Grow Awry

Grow Awry

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Lady Loves the Movies

I hope that my interest in movies can be fully expressed in my position as an information professional. In my small library I do offer some reader's advisory, but I have found myself recommending movies to patrons just as often, if not more. I have started to gather donations with the hopes to obtain a movie license soon so that we can start having regular movie nights. I would love to start a film club in my library's small rural community where I can showcase all sorts of movies for all ages and interests... un dia! 

For the last two years I have kept a list of all the movies I watch with the intent of familiarizing myself with filmmakers, their styles, and the significance of the time period in which they were filmed. I set a goal to meet by the end of the year, and for the year 2015 I watched a total of 170 movies falling 15 short from my goal of 185. Being a full time grad student/full time employee can be absolutely maddening! Any critical movie discoveries of 2015? I would say 2014 was the year I devoted to exploring Altman and Cassavetes while 2015 was the year I fully explored Federico Fellini... and I fell in love. I fell in love with the dreaminess, the nostalgia, the cartoon-y faces, the loneliness, the circus.

I have gathered some screenshots I took of some of those movies and I decided to share them in chronological order of their release date beginning with Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus (1952) ending with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman (2014). Note that some of them have subtitles, I did this as an experiment and discovered that it didn't work well with all because some of my favorite shots had no words, just images, so although it worked for some, the majority I felt were best left without. 

Enjoy!