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Storytelling and World Cinema
How abandoning Hollywood product has improved my writing
I can remember only once watching a movie by myself and loving it. I was tripping and was so enraptured by “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” that I immediately rewound the VCR tape and watched it all over again (don’t judge).
Otherwise, give me a book. The cinema in my head beats anything coming out of Hollywood, thank you very much.
Then I fell in love with a real cinephile, the kind of person who thinks watching all 7 hours and 30 minutes of Hungarian director, Béla Tarr’s, “Satantango” is a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon (which it is by the way).
Over the past nine years, we have watched roughly 1800 movies together, mostly at home thanks to the New York Public Library and then, until it shut down, Kanopy, a free movie/documentary streaming service that had an astonishing range of movies. But one of the many reasons that I adore living in New York City is having access to countless foreign, classic, and independent movies on the big screen.
And those are the kinds of movies that thumb their noses at linear narrative arc or tidy adherence to an easily-followed plot. Years of immersing myself in defiantly non-linear storytelling that trusts its readers/viewers to keep up has opened some…
