experimental cinema

i start every day reading a few pages of a book, mostly poetry books, but often too film books which range from criticism to guides to collections of reviews. i read in the john like a lot of people. these are usually collections i've read before and so do a little re-reading to fortify myself for the journey thru my day. but sometimes i read start to finish a whole new book.

today i re-read from alex gildzen's collection it's all a movie. if there ever was one bonafide nut for movies it's alex. now alex and i approach movies a bit differently. i'm not all that keen with celebrity culture and alex loves old hollywood glamour. i respect old hollywood glamour and yes i do swoon over bogey lighting two cigs, one for himself and one for bacall. but for me i dig the nuts and bolts of movie-making and if i went back to school i'd study filmmaking.

however, alex's love of movies is so evident that i swooned, again, when i read these lines:

I've been alive long enough
to have life & movies collide

. . .

so now it's all a movie
what I watch & what I live

yes. a true film geek is alex that cinema also had a major influence on his poetry. how could it not. the poems have a sweep of the camera taking close-ups of faces. the sentence are often unpunctuated and the words themselve are constructed by an ingenious system of contractions that recall, at least to this reader, the staccato editing of say scorsese. the book even begins with the section 'my first movie' that on the occasion of sal mineo's 57th birthday alex solicited first movie memories from '50 fascinating people'. it is fascinating and all day i've been trying to remember my own first movie memory. but i can't remember. i've been going to movies even before i was verbal. films are a huge part of my life.

i think all movie nerds have at least one life-changing film that turned us on to movies for the rest of our natural days. for me that movie is star wars [1977]. i was 10 years old and just waiting the four hours in the blistering heat of a sac summer day in the parking lot of the local cineplex was enough of a movie experience. it was exciting as hell, that waiting. but when the movie started and the scrawl floated into the black background of space and stars and the camera lowered into the frame the planet tattooine and a space ship zips by over head followed by an imperial star destroyer that was so big that it felt like it took 20 minutes for it to pass, at that moment i was changed forever into a gonzo nut with celluloid wired into the synapses of my brain.

that life altering event is what i find in alex's book. the experiments of life, cinema and poetry are all-encompassing. i can't have one without the others. neither can alex. it's all a movie solidifies my belief that i'm not alone in my obsessions, and that life is lived to the fullest, at least for me, when poetry and movies are mated to my dna.