Film Matters Magazine

[T]he sacrificial victim must send up long-drawn-out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?

— Yukio Mishima, CONFESSIONS OF A MASK

Invigorated by the adrenaline of a new semester, this past February I plunged into a deep dive of the bibliography of writer, playwright, model, and nationalist Yukio Mishima and, by happenstance, discovered a new favorite book of mine: Confessions of a Mask. The novel is narrated by a deeply closeted and sexually repressed adolescent who finds himself fascinated with images and drawings of the mortally wounded and bloodied bodies of strong young men. Particularly fond of depictions of Saint Sebastian, the narrator finds that these scenes of dying young men speak to something burrowed deep within him. I include this passage here because it conveys the nature of the relationship between the performer and the spectator, the one who does and the one to whom it is done. Sometimes while watching a film, I hear a cry inside of me but it is base and small and too humiliating to give credence to; I smother the cry until it becomes unbearable or until I hear it mimicked in some way in the world around me as Mishima’s narrator does, a loneliness that reverberates and is responded to until it becomes something more. When the cry becomes unbearable, when the struggle of life grates too harshly against the soul, there becomes a need that is like an itch; a need to create and mirror and reflect the unreflectable. Anxious turnings of the stomach, deep hollows in the chest that strike harder than sadness, the tinges of fire along the strip of the neck, become dramatic soliloquies, dance moves, splashes in a pool, words even.

I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the heaving and swelling of the sea…

— James Baldwin, “Congo Square”

Toni gets close, pressing her face against the window in the door. She watches intently, in awe. The dancers battle amongst each other, and the camera switches back to Toni’s body pressed against this door. The dancers now move in slow-mo, the sounds of the music and the room muffled. We focus on one dancer, and her expressive face as she moves. And now, back to Toni, with a look of desire, or longing, on her face. Her focus is broken by her brother, who asks: “You coming?”

C is for Cinema, but that is admittedly too broad of a subject, so I will narrow it down to the time in which, for most, cinephilia begins: childhood. I am around five years old. I am with my sister, or my mother. The movie is High School Musical. I don’t remember the plot, as the hour-and-thirty-eight-minute film was too long for me to control my attention span. However, this movie is my first experience escaping from my living room and joining the world on the screen in my living room. I am a part of every dance routine, and I am even on the court dribbling the basketball with Troy Bolton and the Wildcats. Every longing gaze Troy aimed at Gabriella is not for her, but for me, a five-year-old who has now discovered the feeling of a celebrity crush. I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen.^[i] This movement of dance and music affects me. I am forced to care deeply about a cast of characters for the first time in my life. Maybe C should be for connection. Connection is the catalyst of cinephilia.

E is for encounter, and exchange, which are one and the same. E is also for “eyes,” those objects through which our encounters and exchanges take place: eyes through screens, eyes glancing toward cameras, eyes deliberately not glancing toward cameras, eyes closing. The acknowledgement of a screen, the slow eyelid droop of an afternoon nap. Encounter is, first and foremost, about what we see.

Collectively Composed by Victor Bowman-Rivera, Linh Ngoc Bui, Andrenae Jones, Annie Martin, Quillan Qian, Anniyah Rawlins, and Kailyn Shepherd 

With thanks to Professor Amelie Hastie for organizing our contributions to this Preface

Let us assume, to begin with, that films themselves engage in the art of description. Just as poets describe the world, so do film makers – with all the technological possibilities available to them.

— Lesley Stern

We hope you will read the following essays, produced for our fall 2021 Amherst College course “The Film Essay,” and see only a sliver of the full breadth of what can be achieved when writing about film. Of course, film criticism isn’t just the rushed scribbles that only barely answer the all-too-prompted question of “Well, how did you like it?” Film criticism, or well-written film criticism, is concise, patient, and curious. But that doesn’t have to mean that film criticism must be constricted in its form, in how it is communicated from one mind to another. We write “criticism” not just to break apart but to accompany, to add harmonies melodically, and to continue traveling with the films we’ve seen. We do it for the love of the feelings we felt in the work of art, for the love of words and the spaces they can transport us into, the emotions they can at times capture and transmit.