Beginnings 2

Here comes the first "hiccup".  After reading, re-reading, and reflecting over my first post--short as it was--I've decided I'm not quite satisfied with it.  The thing I immediately noticed is a simultaneously irritating and pleasurable aspect to blogging: how easy it is to tinker with its content and its shape.   The choices seem endless.  Take for example the "wallpaper" I decided to use.  I chose an image from Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an astonishingly beautiful animated film from 1926 made entirely with hand cut paper silhouettes.  This film I felt captured a number of subtle suggestions that I wanted to enhance the blog.  It was a film that conveyed immediately the idea of "shadows" on a screen; a reference, not merely, to movies, but also to Plato's famous allegory of the cave, Indonesian wayang kulit shadow puppet theater, hand shadow puppets, and folk shadow puppet theater in general.  In each of these examples there is a substitution of a "higher" reality for a "lower" simulation, but always with the implication that the greater truth is casting the shadow in the first place.  A wonderfully rich philosophical way to think about the artistic power of cinema.  Perhaps I haven't clearly framed this notion yet, but I'll keep trying--to clarify it for you, and for myself.  Also, silhouettes as an art form have fascinated me for many years.  I love the delicate and intricate silhouettes of Hans Christian Andersen, as well as Kara Walker's more recent politically charged work. 

Hans Christian Andersen silhouette

Kara Walker silhouette

There is also Peter Weir's flawed but interesting film The Year of Living Dangerously, in which I was first exposed to the magic of Indonesian wayang kulit, and of Indonesian folklore and spiritual traditions.  Movies have opened my consciousness to many things.

Indonesian wayang kulit

 Anyway, I've segued here pretty badly.  What I started to say was that the myriad choices offered to a blogger are both frustratingly infinite, as well as pleasurably so.  And this leads to endless tinkering. 
My first post, Beginnings, was one in which I wanted to capture a sense of what it was like to be a child in the mid-Sixties exposed to so many movies via TV, and the strangely comforting familial sharing of horror films.  I launched into an unscholarly but innocuous rendering of film history, which I believe I learned from an old PBS documentary I watched ages ago, and then tried to meld it to the particularly personal experience of viewing The Pit and the Pendulum for the first time with my family.  I don't think I conveyed the thrill of a small child being invited to share an adult pleasure, or the sense of both mischievousness and protection that my father represented to me.   I was being played with affectionately, and yet the images from that film still haunt me.  Their power has diminished over time, but they still give me a strange rush of vertigo and pleasure.  And this had so much to do with my father, who served as a kind of gatekeeper: exposing me to the small, less threatening horrors of movies, haunted houses, and amusement park thrill rides--my own childhood Virgil.  So horror films in general, and those of my early years particularly, are embellished with a kind of shining bronze of warm nostalgia for him.