April 21:

One moment that I think strongly relates to my essential question (how can we understand films?) was when Kamara and I recorded our podcast episode about Martyrs and 28 Days Later (although I’ll mainly be writing about Martyrs). Martyrs was a film that Kamara and I both had tremendous issues with, even though it’s a largely loved horror film. Our main issues with it were how it used child abuse as a buzz word to heighten the stakes of the film, which to both of us felt cheap and exploitative and wrong. This moment relates to our essential question because it showed how Kamara and I were experiencing and understanding this film differently than many other people. 

This moment was also evident of us exploring our passions because we were watching a horror film and picking apart the many reasons why it didn’t work for us. We both love films and, when watching something like Martyrs, it’s important to understand why we don’t like it so that, moving forward, we know what works for us and what doesn’t work for us, as well as what we want to avoid. For example, our biggest issue was with the film not being respectful, so we know that if we ever make a film like Martyrs, we want to be respectful to the real-world experiences as well as to the characters of the story. In a very different way, we were persevering as well because Martyrs is a very violent, and very unenjoyable film, but we were both committed to watching it, understanding/contextualizing it, and talking about it.

I don’t know how we can be showing grit when watching movies and talking about them. It’s a pretty clean thing to do. But, I guess sticking to our schedule and taking notes and trying our bests to really push our conversations into deeper and more introspective topics/feelings demonstrates grit of some sort. We want our conversations about these films to go deeper than “that shot was crazy” or “the music was bad and took me out of it”. We want to say why these things are the way they are, which on the surface sounds tremendously easy, but, in my experience at least, as we’ve gone through this experience, isn’t as simple as it seems. To sum up why a film works for you, why a character doesn’t work, in simple and straight forward sentences isn’t very easy. Films are a very emotional thing, and to adapt those feelings into words isn’t always easy. So, in that sense, we’re demonstrating grit.