Being a Film Studies graduate of UW-Milwaukee was one of the best intellectual experiences of my life.
During my senior year of college I was awarded an Internship at the Charles Allis Art Museum and became the Co-Host of Movie-Time in which I presented classic 30’s and 40’s movies all on original 16mm reel-to-reel film.
The one aspect about film school that I found slightly disappointing was the fact that most of the other film students in my program had never seen a film by brilliant auteurs such as Yasujirô Ozu, Robert Bresson or Luis Buñuel.
They might have heard about one or two Billy Wilder films, could name half a dozen Hitchcock classics, and almost all of them watched Star Wars and The Dark Knight more times than I cared to remember.
When most film students would list off their all-time favorite films, nearly every one of the titles named were made after the 1970’s; while almost all of them were directed by either Quentin Tarantino, Zack Snyder or Christopher Nolan.
I discovered that most people seem to be less interested about the black and white classics of the past and more interested with the popular rise of comic book movies, latest CGI technology, video games, anime cartoons, endless movie franchises and the next sequel or remake.
One of the large problems with audiences today is their extremely short attention spans and their inability to concentrate. It has been said attention spans have fallen from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to a mere 8 seconds in 2007, which was around the same time the iPhone revolution began and the popular rise of both YouTube and social media.
Because of such mindless technological distractions the patience of filmgoers seems to have greatly diminished. We are content with living in a vapid society made up of constant selfies, rap & hip-hop music, sports worshipping, social media narcissism and the latest Adam Sandler comedy.
Being a early 80’s millennial who was heavily raised in a highly consumer society, I was constantly brought up on eating fast food, watching reality television, and following celebrity pop culture.
Yet even I am startled to see that people are only able to reference scenes of classic American movies, not by watching the films, but simply by being brought up on endless Family Guy episodes or 30 second sound bites with ironic quick-witted puns.
Today, if the normal movie watcher can’t be patient enough to wait around for the arrival of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949), what will moviegoers be like in twenty years from now?
Throughout the years of watching films I have become so familiar with particular film directors that they become something like a close and comforting friend.
Bresson presents a harsh world of cruelty while revealing redemption and salvation of the soul.
Buñuel shamelessly points out the fetishes and absurdities in the most serious of subject matters.
Kurosawa celebrates the accomplishes of masculine men in a violent patriarchal society.
Tarkovsky consolidates our feelings through abstract, transcendental poetry and deep meditation.
Fellini shows us the grotesques of the circus and the lusts, regrets and self doubts of an artist.
Antonioni explores metaphysical alienation within the contemporary world of modernization.
Ozu shares domestic family traditionalism while also questioning domestic post-war feminism.
Finally throughout this cinematic journey every cinephile should inevitably arrive at Bergman; an auteur who intensely searches for the existential answers of faith, insanity and death, while projecting the guilt and frustrations of living in a godforsaken world.
— Matthew A. Sheldon
Matthew Sheldon's Creative Writings 