16 December 2008

Art Films in OKC

Besides Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the other experience that blew my mind this weekend was watching Jean Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders. And even though I told him to hush, I loved hearing about my dad's first experience with this film, watching it at the movie house where he worked as a teenager in Oklahoma City. He saw all of Godard's films there. All of Bergman's. The world opened up for him then.

"No one had seen anything like this," he said. Describing the playing the penny opera machine, and how this movie changed everything for him, how nothing was ever the same again, my heart fluttered at those words, how I inherited a heart like my dad's, one so moved by the visible and invisible, scenes of Paris, barren trees, movement, big longing eyes, a flow of sequential steps, words spoken and unspoken, and the thrill of how a hat tipped one way, a car flying the other way, and an extreme HERE. NOW. presence can come across in a reel of images moving together to make something incredibly magical and extremely close. Check out the Madison scene.


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