Part Eight: Studying Film

For me, the whole idea of taking film seriously, as something that could be really studied and interpreted, started in high school and reached a high my senior year, when I wrote two papers on film. The first was a research paper that also included a class presentation for advanced English, where I had to tie in something pop culture-related with the journey of the hero and all that Joseph Campbell-type stuff. Growing up, Chris (my brother) and I were both pretty obsessed with the James Bond movies, so that seemed like a pretty natural choice. I spent hours in different branches of the St. Louis Public Library researching and getting basic information for my paper. That remains one of my favorite things I've written about film to this day. For the second paper, my Spanish teacher assigned each of us a famous Spanish-speaking person to do a research paper on, and as she knew I was into film, she assigned me the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. I hadn't seen any of his films, so I rented All About My Mother and Talk to Her, the only two Almodóvar films that Blockbuster had. I loved All About My Mother so much that I watched it three times before I had to return it. It is definitely my favorite Spanish-language film, and is right behind the French Amélie as my favorite foreign language film. Almodóvar is now one of my favorite filmmakers, and I am always on the lookout to see more of his films. His last entry of this decade, Broken Embraces, was officially released in November (2009), but it won't be coming to a theater near me until 2010.

Writing about film in that capacity intrigued me, and when I discovered that the college I attended (Mizzou or the University of Missouri - Columbia) offered a Film Studies minor, I was pretty excited. The classes I took explored a wide range - everything from auteurs (separate classes on Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen) to screenwriting, and from Soviet cinema to "Food on Film."

Those first two papers in high school and my first three years of college with my "minor" interest in film lead me to the next post.