Filming Life

I have always enjoyed movies, but since becoming a Netflix addict I've become a bit more discriminating.  For instance, I've decided that there are films and then there are movies.  But they are not the same.  I looked up these words in the dictionary, and both terms are defined as "motion picture."  Yes, yes, but there really is a difference.  How to express it is the challenge.

Movies are entertainment.  And very often are well done and effectively. Films, however, don't set out to entertain but rather to capture life. Which is not at all simple to do.  One movie that does this exquisitely is June Bug.  Herein lies the beauty of Netflix.  I would never have seen this movie because I had never heard of it until I was surfing around on their site and by happen chance landed on this one.  The film's description does not serve it well and I fear it has been passed over time and time again as a result.  It is likely that I only hit "Move to que" because of the viewer reviews that are generally helpful in making or breaking a selection.    Of the three I had to chose from on the night I watched it, it was the one I was least enthusiastic about.  So I chose to watch it first in order to quickly send it back and move on to the ones I was looking forwarding to seeing.  

What a work of art June Bug turned out to be.  After viewing this film I decided I needed to be clear that there is indeed a very real difference in motion picture genres; that of movies and films.  Die Hard is a movie.  June Bug is a film.  Now there are some pictures that appear to be films but really aren't - Woody Allen movies fall into this category; film want-a-bes.  Perhaps his earlier work, but definitely nothing recent.  Some films have within them, movie moments, like Elizabethtown.  Some movies have film moments, like Henry Poole Was Here.  

How does one tell the difference?  Its very simple actually.  Movies are always one layer (or several) removed from real life.  They aim to tell a story well, or dramatically to a particular demographic of the general population; they aim to move people to laugher or to tears, to see a particular point of view, or to pursue justice.  Films, on the other hand, don't consider the audience.  The aim is not to affect the viewer, intentionally.  Films simply reflect life; from the mundane to the tumultuous, complicated to the ironic, trivial to the tragic.  However the viewer responds is completely random and based solely on that individual's life experiences and the emotions tied to buried memories.  This isn't perfection, its metaphor.

In June Bug, there is a scene of a suburban yard in the South in the summertime.  The camera remains focused on a patch of lawn; the only movements are the honey bees circling over the clover blossoms.  I was there.  I was back there, in the South as a child in my back yard, as college student walking across campus, as a young wife in a first and failed marriage at my in-laws house.  That simple scene evoked in me every memory of clover in suburban lawns I have ever known but had no reason to ever again recall.  The movie is over, the simple, delicate, cruel, tender, tragic story has been told from the place it began until the place it ended, but I'm still walking in lawns with clover and reliving the simple, delicate, cruel, tender, tragic stories of my own life.  This is a film.  

I love movies. (Avatar in 3D rocks.) They require much less emotional work than films.  Films tap into all our unguarded vulnerabilities. They find us out without really trying because the primitive act of reflecting even the most fragmentary images of life is powerful enough.  It's no wonder films are not summer blockbusters.  I'll be working on the bees in the lawn for weeks, maybe for years.  Not many of us want to expend that much energy on such introspection; on recalling things that are so seemingly insignificant and yet are wide open windows into our inner lives; revisiting the imperfections one's past with such vivid intensity is not for those not prepared or willing to take such a journey.

I've been thinking about the genre of film (as I have defined it for my own use) as a way of looking at Holy Scripture.  Why? Because I think that approaching the Bible as a genre unto itself renders it largely inaccessible.  So consider a new metaphor for approaching holy text.  If one thinks about it, there are many similarities between the two. Scripture does not set out to entertain us.  It does have a story to tell, but it is told without bias for who will hear it or in what place and time that might happen.  Perhaps originally, but that time is long gone, the context and immediacy of storyteller and intended audience no longer exists.  Broadly speaking, time and history have altered the stories' ability to affect us in the originally intended ways and so that part of them has become moot, if not altogether silent.  This said, there are within the biblical texts stories worth telling and retelling; each has within it reflections on human life that transcend time and place.  Viewed this way, as film, instead of quill and ink on papyrus, we can see the narratives as the camera would record them; with idle, unhurried pauses lingering in sparse rooms, the dramatic Mars-scape of the desert wilderness, or brown, grassy hillsides littered with limestone rocks, in the pregnant pauses between what is said and what goes unsaid. The heaviness of decades of building anger against oppression and exploitation rests in a the foretold future of a single cornerstone.   Simple lines drawn in the dirt unearth a multitude of wrongs and release a word of mercy to disperse them as they rise threateningly into the air between the accused and the accusers.  A small boat heaves and rolls at the mercy of a stormy sea; the wind and waves are silenced by an effortless word from one abruptly woken, moreover disturbed by eternal, conditional nature of human faithfulness.  

The whole of the biblical story, God's relentless pursuit of us, and our repeated, predictable apathetic responses are recorded as reflections of raw life. The narratives are moving, unable to be captured adequately by the portraits or still shots we attempt to hold them in.  They are stronger than us, bigger than any single life; bound together they form the very foundation of the earth beneath our feet.  Our attempts to contain render them elusive and emotionally irrelevant.  But to read them as film is to open ourselves to the possibility of going in a direction we did not intend, to submit our selves to the randomness of what comes up and trusting that it is safe. 

There is a time and place to watch a good movie.  But for each of us, there comes a time when there is no substitute for a well-made film.  Sometimes we don't need to watch how other's live, we need to review and reflect on our own lives; on the art of learning to live, to survive, to thrive, at times alone and at times in good company. And for some, there is a time to make our own films, just so we can figure out what it means to be alive, what it means to be a part of a story bigger than our own.