On Buffery and Blogging… January 3, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General , trackbackNow tell me; just what is a film buff? Friends often label me ‘a bit of a film buff’ while looking at me askew with a wry, slightly pitying smile. It’s an appellation that’s clearly on a par with being ‘a bit touched’, and, no doubt they substitute ‘buff’ with ‘bore’ when my back is turned. Frankly, straight to my face if I’m honest.
But just what is a ‘film buff’? Because I’ve never considered myself so. I’m not talking about someone who merely likes a good film, I’m thinking more someone who absolutely lives film, who salivates at the mere thought of a season of Pro-Maoist Chinese propaganda movies at the NFT.
An analogy. I have a friend to whom football, as Bill Shankly famously said, is not a matter of life and death. It’s more serious than that.
I always fancied myself a fan of the beautiful game, but close proximity to this chap, revealed to me that I was someone who just, well, liked football, even if I like it rather a lot. I didn’t lock myself away in darkened rooms when my team lost, I didn’t hate the opposition with a bile spitting fury, and I didn’t foster small vendettas stretching back through the decades (of which I was reminded on a recent trip north of the border and a Victorian era statue that trumpeted ‘Remember Bannockburn!’, complete with what looked like Blair era spray-painted invective beneath, the gist of which - expletives deleted for this ‘U’ certificate post - was ‘English Go Home!’ Long, long memories the Scots…)
The point is, that though I wept like a baby the night my team won the Champions League final in 1999 (the memory of the previous European win 21 years previously being all too vividly recalled), that I shed more tears when George Best drank himself to death, I realised that, compared to my friend, my fandom was merely skin deep. And the realisation left me slightly wounded. I shouldn’t just ‘like’ my team, pecking it on the cheek like some bespectacled third cousin, I should be deeply in love with it to the point of obsession, full-on French kissing, tongues and all. I’m not a ‘fan’, I just - shudder - like football. A horrifying moment of self-realisation. Me and football are, clearly, going to have to go to counseling…
Oddly enough, as I’ve mentioned previously, my passion for kicking an inflated bladder around, and being conned at 24 frames per second, hit me at roughly the same moment in my childhood, the gladiators of Old Trafford vying for wall space with Bogart, Karloff and Dietrich. But if I don’t consider myself a proper football fan so, it follows, the same might also be true of film.
All it takes is a quick look around FilmJournal and the reviews at DVD Times and it’s revealed to me that I must be playing fast and loose with the truth when people say to me ‘You’re a bit of a film buff aren’t you?’ (sounds to me like ‘a bit unique’; you either are, or you’re not…) and I nod grimly in the affirmative waiting for them to ‘test’ me some damn silly pub quiz question. I’m a blundering, stumbling amateur compared to the legions of witty, intelligent, authoritative commentators writing on the ‘net. I come at this whole film blogging thingie with no formal education in film, no experience of film-making, no blinding, razor sharp, critical, intellect. Film and I have long enjoyed a quick fumble on the back row. But is it love? And as such why should anyone - you dear reader - take a blind bit of notice of any opinion I hold? Witnesses for the prosecution please…
For a start I don’t go to the movies very often - I think I went three times in the whole of 2006 - and you’d have to drag me, kicking and screaming, to a festival of Stalinist Czech animation, or Iranian comedies. I have never sat through any Bollywood film, and when I do watch any recent movies I ruin them for anyone else by lecturing those few that will listen (or even those that won’t) on what a complete pile of poo this is, as if I’m some kind of bleedin’ expert, or my views are needed or welcome. Pul-lease; my head sometimes screams at my mouth, just shut the hell up.
So, if I do have a passion, it is, most affirmatively, for films of a certain vintage, having been educated, movie-wise, on a diet of ’30s and ’40s films on TV, and being an avid cinema-goer for much of the ’60s, ’70s and half of the ’80s, when, well, other things in life began to shoehorn in on my time and disposible income, and ‘avid’ became ‘irregular’. That and the fact that I carelessly dubbed much of Hollywood’s output at the time to be pants. Very large y-fronted pants indeed.
I fancy I’m an admirer of certain actors, directors or genres, but I find, that compared to some, I’m oddly passionless, for instance, about collecting, say, every single film noir on the planet (even knowing what even constitutes noir these days. Western-Noir? Aw, come on…), or digesting every small scrap of detail about the careers or privates lives of the film community.
I had a salutary, possibly life changing, experience as a third form oik at school, having long bored my chums with an enthusiasm for Universal monster movies that was possibly a tad unhealthy in a 13-year-old boy.
Then the bigger boys come; the towering hulk that was fourth former Garth Davies (later a guitarist with The Buzzcocks; no, you won’t have seen him, record management having convinced the band they must ditch him should his cleft palate frighten the pre-pubescent girls that watched Top Of The Pops), cornered me during lunch-break and said ‘So you like films do you?’ in a quite threatening manner. I stammered into a credential proving eulogy on William Henry Pratt, and he fired back a question about Buñuel. I stared at him silently (probably wondering if he meant Isambard Kingdom Buñuel, the famous Spanish architect and ship designer), and he looked at me with a mixture of both contempt and satisfaction in equal parts. No. Contest.
I can’t compete with those that attack the output of some foreign studio, whose name I can’t even pronounce, with obvious zeal. I can’t hope to match those that find genuine delight in broadening their cinematic horizons, that boldly go where few have gone before. I’m goggle-eyed in wonder at those that declare a DVD presentation to be as so unlike the film they saw three or four decades previously as to be a total travesty. I am in awe. Plant me in front of, say, Peter Jackson’s King Kong on DVD and ask me if it resembles the theatrical showing and I’ll stare at you blankly. I can’t bloody remember that far back.
I can’t even play the game of one-upmanship, long enjoyed by some on various film fora, where not knowing who choreographed / photographed / assistant produced / best boy(ed) a film you claim to love is clearly grounds for committal. Can’t play. Won’t play.
And so it has ever been. I look at my collection of films on DVD, mainly Hollywood, mainly films and artistes whose work I’m familiar with, and wonder what my passion really consists of? Does it revolve around a genuine love for these movies, or is it just the pull of pure nostalgia, some dismal desire to regress into a past when my world was young and everything was possible?
Hmmm. I suppose there’s an element of nostalgia in the mix, it’s not wholly that but it’s there, certainly. I can’t - won’t - deny that. As I’ve probably postulated before, Mrs H tells me that’s why I weep so easily at films these days; the recollection of days long, long gone is almost too hard to bear. She may have a point there, or maybe not. I can’t be certain without the ministrations of a psychiatrist. But do I love them? Well, again, if I’m honest, not all of them. Revisiting some films that I have a happy memory of is a sometimes depressing experience. Working my way through the recent Paul Newman Collection, I found myself beginning to hate Harper (my memory went straight into a hissy-fit, recalling the film as a minor masterpiece), and even finding Newman mildly irritating. I shouldn’t read too much into that I suppose. I watched a BBC transmission of Jaws a couple of years ago and found myself extremely agitated with the fact that it appeared to be complete rubbish - the fact that they showed a washed out print in the incorrect aspect ratio might have had something to do with it. Within a couple of weeks I watched the DVD and fell in love with the movie all over again. It was a strange experience.
But I’m not a film buff. I’m just a guy into his fifth decade of movie watching, who has never ’studied’ film in the truest sense of the word, who has picked up a little knowledge, some of it trivial, or prurient, some of it in a bid to better understand what it was some long dead artist was trying to say, not only to contemporary audiences, but to those down the ages about the human condition.
I get a kick out of watching a film that I’ve seen maybe a 100 times (slight exaggeration, but bear with me…) and seeing something new, something that peels back the layers a little further that changes, perhaps, my perception of the whole piece. And I get a kick out of reading the views of film writers and reviewers - and in the main the standard on the ‘net is very high - which also may help in achieving that better understanding or appreciation.
I also get a kick out of being entertained. If all I’m doing here, pontificating about the films I love, is entertaining myself then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that because writing this rubbish is, actually, pretty good fun even if I’m the only fella reading it (otherwise why the hell do it?) Bizarrely, I do know it would be less so, would I have to churn out the words, were I, heaven forfend, a professional movie reviewer or commentator. But, midst all these ramblings, if I can also introduce you, gentle reader, to a film you’d never seen before, that you too can fall in love with, then, hey, that’s good. I get a kick out of that too.
If you haven’t got one right now, you might sign up for your own FilmJournal blog. It’s a fine thing, this passing of accumulated intelligence; as was said to me yonks ago (and which is why I display the symptoms of film buffery so publicly) what’s the point in knowing something, something potentially useful, something potentially life-enhancing, if you don’t get it out there and tell somebody who may benefit from it?
Who knows? If you aren’t one already, you might become a film buff. Hell; I might even become a film buff one day…
Comments»
I blame the internet. Back in the days when I used to publish a fanzine I could pretend to myself I had a pretty good grasp of the subject at hand. Then I got online and discovered there were individuals (OK, Americans) who not only had me quite beat in terms of trivial knowledge, but had the uncanny ability to recite dialogue and what have you, seemingly at will. Confidence shattered, I retreated back into my shell. It’s only more recently that I stopped caring about these shortcomings and have found places like FilmJournal who happily accomodate my occasional ramblings.
In reference to one of your points, I like to call it the “Tim Lucas Phenomena”: the ability to recall the exact shade of azure witnessed onscreen during a visit to the local flea-pit 25 years previous. It really is a remarkable gift.
One-upmanship; good game isn’t it? Brings to mind the time I was in conversation with one of the Dooleys (an ’80’s MOR group - long back story; too boring to go into), many, many moons ago and she was clearly out to skewer this young upstart. We talked art, film, theatre, and I kept up with her pretty much neck and neck (which surprised no one more than I), much to her obvious annoyance. Then books, and we discussed our favourite writers, and then she said sweetly ‘what do you think of George Sands?’
Bugger. It was an Exocet of a question, designed to home in and destroy.
‘Ah, not read much of his work’ replied I, desperate not to sound too much of a dullard…
Kaboom!
Thanks for posting.