Week 144 Weekend-Engagement: Cinema is my passion

"There is no other art form that goes beyond ordinary knowledge as cinema does, straight to our emotions, deep into the dark room of the soul."

Ingmar Bergman

For me, watching a film is not simply a matter of passing the time, I analyze, I look for references, I appreciate the shots, I enjoy the soundtrack, I look closely at the costumes, I try to decipher what the filmmaker and his screenwriters want to tell the audience.

In fact, I am aware that all audiovisual pieces are different, each filmmaker can get to capture his style in the filming he does. That is why it is easy to differentiate a film by Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton or Roman Polanski for example.

The first time I went to the movies my mother took me to see Puss in Boots, I think I was five years old if I'm not mistaken. I entered a dark room with a very particular smell like plastic, suddenly from a very big screen I saw the animated figure of a cat, I let go of my mother's hand and ran out of the room terrified, I was very scared. That was my first reaction to a movie. My mother managed to catch me with some effort, and explained to me that what we were about to see on the screen was a lie. I knew that cat wasn't real, what I still didn't process was why those drawings were so ugly.

At home, after school work, I watched a lot of television, although like every child I did not miss the cartoon block that was programmed in the afternoons, I was always more interested in a channel that after two o'clock in the afternoon transmitted very old movies, where cowboys, Indians, adventurers, aviators, jungle men, dancing couples, giant monkeys and even spacemen appeared. Thus, I met: the great King Kong, John Wayne in countless roles as a cowboy or as an aviator, Johnny Weissmüller (shout included) and the monkey Cheetah, Humphrey Bogart playing a private detective, or an adventurer in a rickety boat with Katherine Hepburn, Buster Crabe as Flash Gordon, with the evil emperor Ming, Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers dancing happily ever after, Esther Williams swimming choreographically with other girls, Clark Gable with Claudette Colbert in a comedy that I didn't understand because I was too young called It Happened One Night, Cary Grant and again Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby a comedy where they talked very fast and chained many funny scenes one after the other, and you stop counting. There were also some very funny movies like Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Abbot and Costello, and some crazy brothers: the Marx Brothers.

I really enjoyed these films, and those afternoons sitting in front of the TV, I was transported to other countries, I felt inside the story I was witnessing, and I lived with the protagonist the adventure, his dreams and ideals. Many times I think I even managed to empathize with the actions of the bad guy in the movie.

The custom in my house was to send me to sleep at eight o'clock at night, however, I knew from a magazine called Tv Guia that after eleven o'clock at night in the only four channels that were at that time in my country Venezuela programmed scary or horror movies, sometimes science fiction movies were shown.

I would pretend to be asleep, wait until eleven o'clock at night and sneak into the living room, doing what today we call manual zapping with the channel knob on the TV. I met many times with Count Dracula, especially with Christopher Lee, I met Ray Milland in The Man with Two Heads, Vincent Price in The Fly, I enjoyed the infamies and excesses of Rasputin again with Christopher Lee, I was impressed with The Incredible Shrinking Man, saw Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, witnessed much destruction of cities in monster movies like Godzilla, or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, (with mind-blowing stop motion FX by the celebrated Ray Harryhausen.

All these wonderful movies, stories, and artists that I have referred to passed before my eyes in glorious black and white, since in the 70's there was no color television in Venezuela.

I would go to the movies when my aunts or my mother would take me on Saturdays and because of my age I would only go to Disney movies, which always seemed too optimistic and sometimes very silly, except for Dumbo, an animated film that moved me and almost made me cry because of the mistreatment of that poor elephant, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Kirk Douglas, in a very entertaining film with a large dose of adventure.

In 1977 and 1978 I made with my mother the biggest queues I remember to see any movie, these were Star Wars and Grease. The first movie practically left me with my mouth open during its entire running time and the second one made me fall in love with the beautiful Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton John.

In 1980 I was already twelve years old, and in the face of such a visual avalanche I felt like a cinephile. At that young age I bought as many newspapers and magazines as I could and avidly searched for any article related to cinema.

I educated myself about film genres, directors and films that I had never seen but should see. I was amazed by the golden age of Mexican cinema with films by Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Maria Felix, Sara Garcia and of course Cantinflas and Tin Tan.

My uncle at that time bought a device that revolutionized my way of watching movies, a Betamax. He, knowing my love for the seventh art, lent me his membership card to a video club, and on weekends I managed to get films by Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Luchino Visconti. I discovered another kind of non-commercial cinema.

I finally managed to appreciate Jaws, The Exorcist with Linda Blair and the supposedly ultra-violent film The Warriors, which I didn't find as brutal as they said.

I would be lying if I said I didn't like those great action and horror movies if I could see Scarface, Raiders of The Lost Ark, Bloodsport, Commando, the Rocky movies, First Blood, Terminator, Delta Force, Cobra, Die Hard, Predator, Robocop, Death Wish 3, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th among many with actors like Jean Claude Van Damme, Silvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis and many more. In addition, I learned to appreciate the works of iconic filmmakers such as James Cameron, Brian De Palma, John McTiernan, John Woo, Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Verhoeven.

During part of these years there was a television program called Cinematheque of the Air hosted by a prestigious Venezuelan film critic named Rodolfo Izaguirre in which he instructed the viewer about the different cinematographic genres, and later he would show us an example of the genre. Thanks to this I got into the work of Charles Chaplin being The Gold Rush the first film I saw of him, I was fascinated by the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, Battleship Potemkin directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein.

After the Betamax player went out of fashion, the VHS player replaced it and I consumed many films that were banned in some countries for being very violent and bloody, such as Cannibal Holocaust, The Evil Dead, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

In the 90's I consumed a lot of commercial film material, going to the movies with co-workers to the theaters for the premieres of movies like The Silence of the Lamb, Ghost, Pretty Woman, Seven, Forrest Gump, Casino, Brave Heart, Matrix, The Green Mile, and witnessed the rise of the DVD player.

Searching for films I got into Chinese action movies from which many American productions have been copied, I was very entertained by the number of Bruce Lee clones and I began to admire John Woo, especially his film Hard Boiled.

I already had a collection of films on VHS and Beta, but I got on this new technology and because of the time that does not forgive and deteriorates the material on tape I gradually replaced old films and included in the collection Marilyn Monroe films, James Bond series films, Akira Kurosawa classics, and Charles Chaplin, the Star Wars collection, the Stanley Kubrick collection, musical films I always wanted to see as Jesus Christ Superstar, The Sound of Music, Tommy, Hair or Heavy Metal.

During the last 23 years as a cinephile I have become a collector, and the films have evolved into very careful productions where the aesthetic takes precedence over the story, analog images have been transformed into digital images that can be manipulated with a computer to improve the special effects of a particular production and as an example of this we have the sagas of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spiderman or films like The Day After Tomorrow, and The War of the Worlds.

As a moviegoer I see the world as if it were part of a movie, in which I myself am the protagonist and at the same time writer of the story and director. In well-made romantic stories I feel the pain, the loneliness, the sadness, or the joy that they want to transmit. If the film is an action film the adrenaline does its job and I get excited, if I connect with a comedy I can laugh out loud, if I am being shown something with a lot of blood or inappropriate a feeling of repulsion is activated.

I try to enjoy every minute and every detail of the film, so I have never stopped watching a film until the end whether it is excellent or very bad. Generally, very good or very bad films eventually become films that are praised by certain groups of people and become cult films.

When watching a movie, a movie buff is able to associate what he sees with real life: sensations, passions, emotions, sounds, his dreams and his desires.

I enjoy my condition as a movie fan to the fullest, and currently with Streaming I have many more options to see new movies, and relive others that I have already seen in the past.

At 55 years old I still believe that Puss in Boots was very ugly, long after I discovered after some consultations that this animated film was a Chinese version of the story of Charles Perrault.

This is my participation in the Topics: Week 144 Weekend-Engagement initiative Link here proposed by @galenkp.

Passion

Tell us what you are passionate about... Religion, cryptocurrencies and gaming are excluded, so please do not write about them. Use photos you've taken yourself, not stock images, and the post must be 300 words or more.

A big hello to all readers, I wish you a happy and productive weekend.

All pictures are my property and were taken with my Umidigi F2 cell phone.