Film school

The debate made the film much more popular than it otherwise would have been, and it was often hailed, by those in the know, so a few college professors and their most industrious students, as one of the real unknown classics of film in the early nineties. Most of the time, when he showed it to friends, they found it compelling though largely unremarkable, and they either complained about the lack of an ending, or felt with certainty, one way or another that the woman either knocked on the door or didn’t, and no amount of devil’s advocate playing every really shifted their original conviction.

The director of the movie, when asked about the siren and the shadowy figure reflected in the mirror that perhaps was just a very large chest of drawers, or the man’s spirit, depending on the imagination and willingness to believe of the viewer, remained silent on the important subject of interpreting his film. “The film is what you want it to be,” he said. “You interpret the film and the film interprets you. It is visceral, internal, the engagement with the film, and no interpretation is definitive. Besides which, he always remarked, the ending of something does not constitute it’s totality, and why didn’t people ever talk about the slow and loving movement of the camera over lush wheat fields, or the tender brush with the steel worker’s faces at lunch, lit up as if they were not of this world. It irritated him that people could only think about the movie as related to its ending. He made the point that people’s lives were often split up into parts, moments, glimpses, chance meetings in a class or on a train, that all of these things were contingent upon the strangeness of being, but that after a person met their spouse or a lover, that it was only the beginning of a story. And perhaps he’d failed if people were unable to imagine Sarah and Joe living on after the conclusion of the film, whether it be for an eternity, or only for a few moments.” “The film, he said, should be more interesting than its ending. Endings, narratively, are artistic bullshit. If I had enough time and money I’d make a movie that spanned a man’s entire lifetime, from birth to death, then maybe we could talk about the ending in relation to the whole scope of his life, but the movie would go on for days, maybe even months, and no film-goer would be able to take off enough time to finish it, and no one would finance it, and it would be terrifically boring.” The interview was cut short at that point, and no one had really ever heard anything conclusive from the director again, though there were some rumors, unsubstantiated that he’d been filming just the epic he’d been describing for the past twenty years in a remote part of the Amazon.