Tweet Do Most People Think Old Film Buffs Are Nuts?

Sometimes I wonder about knowledge, for instance my head seems to be crammed full of useless facts. On the drop of a hat I can recite the entire opening night programme at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne on 15th March, 1929 - but I can never remember where I have put my car keys or my mobile 'phone.

In this 21st Century I find that we are surrounded by incompetence, dim-wittedness, illiteracy, lack of caring,common sense and general knowledge. How people get by and command astronomical salaries makes me wonder at times.

I was quoting me.

And fully aware of what a controversy the idea of a core curriculum (or worse yet, Western Civ) is in academia, and how that controversy has... well... mainly rendered both academia and western civilization less influential, I still say:

there are some things you gotta know to be higher than a cow. What those things are shifts all the time, but not by saying it ain't so and ignorance is knowledge's equal.

As a parent this gets settled in reality real quick. There are a lot of dumb kids out there, and I am in the process of not adding two to them.


Myles, excited to see the painting he most wanted to see at the Vatican, Raphael's The School of Athens.

Good for you, Mike, and good for your children. I firmly believe there is a Western canon and the School of Athens is right at the heart of it. And some knowledge of film history is in there, too.

I firmly believe there is a Western canon

There used to be...before those who know better decreed it must be abandoned to embrace the Holy Grail of Diversity. How absurd to believe the cultures of 5th C. Athens, 15th C. Florence, 18th C. America, offered anything to outshine the equally glorious intellectual attainments of the Third World!

[Mike Gebert]

Well, I don't mean to get all Allan Bloom here, but I'm listening to Sound Opinions, the public radio rock and pop music show, and they just congratulated some rapper named, delicately, Killer Mike (or possibly Killah Mike) for the vast knowledge of things beyond hiphop that included:

1) Knowing of the existence of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew
2) Making the incisive, never-before-made point that Ronald Reagan was a politician who was also an actor

If that makes him the Mortimer Adler of hiphop, bully for him, but yeah, I see this as more the minimum, rather than untold new heights. Mind you, that's not to say everyone needs to adhere to the canon— far from it; I think the point of the canon is to give you something to rebel against, to say, no, Griffth is not the be-all and end-all, there's this and this and this. But I do believe we all need a base to start with, and if you're going to argue that something great is in fact lousy, you need to be armed to make that case.

P.S. The Faerie Queen and Ethan Frome suck.

Any such minimal base of popular-culture knowledge necessarily gets bigger and bigger every year (as more and more culture is, well, produced--or added to a given canon) and there has to come a point where a person finally draws the line and concedes that they know enough to function in their own lives.

I'm not conversant about 90s films or the various HBO series that have been celebrated in the last decade. I have some vague awareness of what they are, but I could never write about them even in a generic way. I've chosen to devote my time to other pursuits and anyone who thinks I'm missing transcendent greatness by ignoring The Shawshank Redemption or Tony Soprano will just have to think so.(I can appreciate "South Park" though, hit-and-miss as its humour can be.)

I'd rather spend time with Lee Tracy or Marie Prevost.

-HA

P.S. The Faerie Queen and Ethan Frome suck.

"A gentle knight was pricking on the plain." Everyday I rack my brain remembering the wereabouts of my keys, billfold, etc., but that line is imprinted indelibly; didn't get much further, however. Ethan proves that even great writers (one of my favorites), being human, sometimes loose their way.

[Christopher Jacobs]

P.S. The Faerie Queen and Ethan Frome suck.

That may well be (I've never read more than excerpts) but Purcell's "The Fairy Queen" is truly sublime, and Glyndebourne did an oddly amusing and distinctively off-beat production a couple years ago that's now on Blu-ray!

You might laugh, but the pair I talked to were not experts, they had only been doing it for a small number of years but were very interesting and enthusiastic in how much they'd learned both by their successes and failures.

There ya go. Enthusiasm in another person can often sweep you with it and bring a dull subject unexpectedly to life.

And I'll bet my Bobby Orr rookie card I could get Frederica interested in some aspect of hockey.

(Hey, they're playing for the championship in your town for only the second time in history, and LA is favoured. Go buy a ticket and watch, Frederica!)


Jim

My interest in this stuff is considered a little weird by my friends which is not the same as them thinking I am weird. Weird interests are considered a plus in my circle. Like someone earlier in the thread said, it gives you the possibility to explore something new. You may or may not take up the new interest but at least you tried it out. I've had lots of friends who've tried silent films at my introduction but they end up not being interested. Thanks fine with me, I know they gave it a genuine shot. On the other hand, people who don't even want to try I find a little disappointing.

I have zero interest in the NHL but can enjoy a game with a fan if they have an intelligent interest in it beyond watching guys crack heads together.

I enjoy silent and early talkie cinema. My wife enjoys them also. I've never really sought anyone else's opinion and I couldn't care less, if I'm honest.

I've always had an intense curiosity about the past, how it has led us to where we are, why we live the way we do. I can't imagine not having that curiosity. I can't imagine living so "blankly" as if I woke up this morning not knowing how I got to this house, who my parents were, who gave me my name. I equate that kind of mentality with those who surf from moment to moment living in a culture that seems to tell us that each succeeding moment is better than the previous, which is best left forgotten except for moments of nostalgia or mockery. That is what our popular culture tells us. God only knows (since I'm not a parent) what people are taught in school. That is, just a bit pretentiously, my explanation for my interest in early film and the performing arts in general, what they have to tell us of why and how we are the way we are, all those pieces of information they give us along the way, waiting to be discovered, giving us another clue or piece of the big puzzle. But even if I tone down the rhetoric and look at movies purely as entertainment, I still arrive at the same place. Why would you not be interested in what entertained our ancestors, people with the same basic genetics, the same brains, the same emotions and needs? Humans haven't changed significantly in the past hundred years, so we are not the latest, greatest model by any stretch of the imagination and I think we need to remember that.

Well said!

I have zero interest in the NHL but can enjoy a game with a fan if they have an intelligent interest in it beyond watching guys crack heads together.

Then you want to sit beside me in the stands.

Jim

I'll be talkin' 'bout vintage (and just plain old) movies on the Michele Jennae Show, Internet's finest radio broadcast, today 9 a.m. California time at HotMix106.com. Just click LISTEN.

God only knows (since I'm not a parent) what people are taught in school.

Nothing so old fashioned & irrelevant as American history.

As to why I'm interested in old films, old radio, old music, old newspapers, well pretty much old anything I think it's because it is indeed a window to a different past. I think Kerr goes into this in The Silent Clowns. But one thing that always strikes me: Watching an early talkie in the early 1970's means I was looking at something about 40 years old. Even watching a Chaplin Mutual meant I was looking at something less than 60 years old. However in both cases it was like watching a different planet. Would kids today get the same feeling watching a 40 year old film? Would M*A*S*H seem to be such a window to a different world? Would The Asphalt Jungle seem really out there in the same way as when I watched The Adventurer as a kid? I don't think but is that just because I grew up in the 1970's?

As to why I'm interested in old films, old radio, old music, old newspapers, well pretty much old anything I think it's because it is indeed a window to a different past. I think Kerr goes into this in The Silent Clowns. But one thing that always strikes me: Watching an early talkie in the early 1970's means I was looking at something about 40 years old. Even watching a Chaplin Mutual meant I was looking at something less than 60 years old. However in both cases it was like watching a different planet. Would kids today get the same feeling watching a 40 year old film? Would M*A*S*H seem to be such a window to a different world? Would The Asphalt Jungle seem really out there in the same way as when I watched The Adventurer as a kid? I don't think but is that just because I grew up in the 1970's?

I'm interested in what today's kids think of Rebel Without A Cause. I recall a thread here in which it was reported that they tended to respond, "What's he [the James Dean character] got to rebel against? He's got a nice house, a cool car, parents who let him stay out every night, a sexy girlfriend..." Apparently they could get the general teenager's angst, but they couldn't get the particularly '50s anti-conformity angst. Dean had everything they aspired to obtain.

Jim

It's even worse if you live in L.A., where taste and intelligence come to die, and anything made in a year beginning with a 1 is considered an antiquity. Still, there are small victories to be had. I recently took a young woman in her 20s (an aspiring stand-up whose notions of comedy stretch all the way back to THE WATERBOY) to see a "real" comedy: IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. To my delight, she was laughing louder than anyone else and afterwards thanked me profusely for taking her, gushing that she has "so much to learn" and asked me to repeat the names of all the stars so she could google them. So you see, the future is only 99% bleak.

Mike S.

"Who says this boy can't fly?!"

"What's he [the James Dean character] got to rebel against? He's got a nice house, a cool car, parents who let him stay out every night, a sexy girlfriend..."

My feelings as well; what the punk needed was a draft notice.

"What's he [the James Dean character] got to rebel against? He's got a nice house, a cool car, parents who let him stay out every night, a sexy girlfriend..."

My feelings as well; what the punk needed was a draft notice.

When we read Catcher in the Rye in high school, that was our take.

Bob

When we read Catcher in the Rye in high school, that was our take.

Bob

That reminds me: I owe my high-school English teacher a dozen long-stem roses...for sparing her class that wretched adolescent drivel. Actually, I really owe her a yard of pearls, but it's a bit late for either--by 20 or 30 yrs. That dear lady--your classic old maid school marm--lived English literature...and made at least a few of those in her classes live it too.

Hey, I LOVE Catcher In the Rye. It made me howl with laughter with its wit and its dead-on impersonation of a 50s teenager's voice, and at the same time I and millions of other North American kids could perfectly identify with its sense of bewildered rebellion.

And while I wasn't impressed by Rebel Without A Cause as a movie, I understood Dean's inarticulate sense that something about modern adult life was soul-killing, and he needed to buy time to figure out why.

I don't think today's teenagers (I have 4 of them myself) are lacking in the same generic sense of resisting the deadening lives of adults. But the values with which they try to counter those adult lives are the exact reverse of the values that teens used to defend themselves in the 50s and 60s and 70s, right through the Punk Rock era. Those earlier teens rejected materialism and judgments based on appearance; today's teens embrace and celebrate materialism and judgments based on appearance. Hence their veneration of those idiotic Kardashian millionaires and the unlistenable but visually defiant and innovative Lady Gaga.

(This is not intended as either an old fogey's "kids today - bah!" rant, nor an "our generation was the best" faux-nostalgia boast. It's nothing more than musings on how teenage angst has changed over the past half-century.)

Jim

I'll make a startling admission: I have never read Catcher In The Rye. By the time I was old enough to want to read such material, it was generally considered quaint and passe. I didn't have time for teen angst anyway, I had a father debilitated by a stroke to help care for.

a 50s teenager's voice

That's what I grew up hearing, everyday, all around me, other stupid kids. But the voices I preferred to hear were those of men (preferably real ones)...such as Audie Murphey's To Hell and Back, which somehow I got my hands on in HS, despite its adult subject matter, or 30 Seconds Over Tokio, which was actually in my HS library. But I hold no beef against reading trash outside class; that any English teacher would squander her limited classroom time on such dreck, is, however, appalling.

I didn't have time for teen angst anyway, I had a father debilitated by a stroke to help care for.

That kind of responsibility sobers one up as quickly as a flashing red light in the rear-view mirror.

I always assumed that, even if they weren't passionate about vintage/classic film, most casual contemporary film fans still would have some interest in preserving film history. But to my dismay, most seem not to care, and are occasionally contemptuous of older, B&W, films. One day I was talking about how I wished more silent films were available on home video, and that copyright law was standing in the way of releases, and a co-worker told me it wouldn't bother her if the copyright holders destroyed them or not, that they had a perfect right to do so. Another time I mentioned watching something on TCM to another co-worker, and she said, "You mean you watch those old black-and-white things?

I don't know where you work, or how old the people were you spoke to, but it's apparent that they have been very brainwashed in their ignorance. I would think you learned quickly not to associate with these people, or bring up the subject again for fear of the inevitable: Being labeled a "nut".

Hey, I LOVE Catcher In the Rye. (This is not intended as either an old fogey's "kids today - bah!" rant, nor an "our generation was the best" faux-nostalgia boast. It's nothing more than musings on how teenage angst has changed over the past half-century.)Jim

The media has a great deal to do with this influence, and what it focuses on today is a reflection of the values of the people in industry now. George Orwell may have been right.

Hey, I LOVE Catcher In the Rye. (This is not intended as either an old fogey's "kids today - bah!" rant, nor an "our generation was the best" faux-nostalgia boast. It's nothing more than musings on how teenage angst has changed over the past half-century.)Jim

The media has a great deal to do with this influence, and what it focuses on today is a reflection of the values of the people in industry now. George Orwell may have been right.

Indeed. The textbook example of this may be Entertainment Weekly. They frequently do lists: "The 25 Best ____," "The 50 Greatest ______," etc., and without fail, everything on the list (save one or two token "oldies") will be from the last 20 years or so. This attitude pervades the entire magazine; one week, they gave Soupy Sales a shorter obit than Bruce Springsteen's assistant road manager! I could understand if it was THE road manager; I mean, after all, who the hell is Soupy Sales? But assistant road manager? I wrote them a letter of indignation; they replied thanking me for my input and that my letter would be considered for publication. (It wasn't.)

Mike S.

I'm reminded of the year 2000, when it was popular to name the best whatever of the 20th century. The top 100 entertainers? You're lucky if Jolson was referenced!

Jolson would stand a better chance now that the late '90s films that crowded the "Best of Century" lists have receded from popular memory. The English Patient and American Beauty might just as well have been made in 1930 in the minds of many of today's moviegoers. Jack Nicholson and Al Jolson come from the same time period, "The Past".