I just posted about the ecstatic truth as revealed to me by Jean Cocteau on my site.
His "poesie" has meant quite a bit to me throughout my life and I connect more fully to humanity through his work.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RthJLZjMR84

Somewhat related to Jean Shepherd's ideas on eternity I've always liked what Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee said, despite the poor rendering of scientific theory: "I think about the cosmic snowball theory. A few billion years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won't matter if I get this guy out."

Not being remembered in 4,000 years gives me comfort. It reminds me of the importance of the time I have now but also lets me know that in the grand scheme of things nothing I do really matters so I shouldn't get too worked up when things don't go as planned.

Beautifully done, jeremy. Just out of curiosity, what equipment did you use to do that commentary?

Jonathan: For me, so much of the appeal of movies is in the idea that time can be held still by putting a frame around it and capturing it in a camera, where it can be re-run, slowed down, examined. It took me a long time to understand what Truffaut was getting at when he said he preferred the representation of life to the thing itself. Now I think this is something like what he meant. In Christopher Isherwood's phrase: "I Am a Camera."

Anyway, let me mention some of the enduring, passionate bonds I formed when my "adolescent window" (or shutter) opened. They include: Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and "Something Happened," "Nashville," "Chinatown," "As I Lay Dying," Monty Python, Firesign Theatre, Vincent Van Gogh, the Marx Brothers, Gustav Mahler, the Beatles, Franz Schubert, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and a whole bunch of Janus releases featured (uninterrupted) on our local PBS station, including my first exposure to the European art-film heroes of the decades before: Bergman, Polanski, Antonioni, Fellini...

Roger's letter to Herzog is enchanting, and it's made me want to go out and watch as many of his works as I can. There are scenes that I can recall have presented me with "ecstatic truth," from artists as diverse as Federico Fellini to Wong Kar Wai. One of the most recent such experiences came when I first saw Bella Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies ... the opening shot (which I've written about here on my blog) simply blows me away. Out of the rough-hewn clay of a working-class bar at closing, Tarr fashions a scene of wonder. It's a scene that distills so much life and it beautifully foreshadows the rest of the film.

The earliest such example I can recall was when I was 14, attending freshman year at the Magnet Center for Public Service (Government and Law) in Dallas. I came across Vincent Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter" in the school library and checked it out. It just so happened that I was a recent devotee of the Beatles; I'd consumed the red and blue albums on 8 Track (their greatest hits) but hadn't explored much beyond that. Bugilosi's nonfiction account of the Manson family cult inspired me to check out "Abbey Road" and "The White Album" at the public library, where they had a listening station with headphones. I listened to those two Beatles albums while reading the middle section of Bugliosi's book. It just so happens that I read the description of the crime scene the first time that I heard "Blackbird." That song by itself never would have been chilling without the juxtaposition of the appallingly gruesome images in Bugliosi's book. It made me think about Kubrick's ironic use of music in "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001" (which I'd recently seen) and about the intersection of art and life (horrifyingly illustrated by the Manson family's obsession with the Beatles, and their belief that the lyrics were sending them hidden messages to incite a race war and destroy America). The experience was devastating for me; I had nightmares about the Mansons after that, invariably scored to Beatles music. I think that experience more than almost any single personal event might have sent me down the road toward writing about movies for a living.

The Janus logo always makes me feel good inside. Whenever I see it I am reminded of the early days of my cinephilia. I know I keep talking about comfort levels but that's how I knew film and the arts in general were what I wanted to explore in life - they made me feel at ease. Now a logo may sound strange to get comfort from but it's the movies associated with them that does it. I also feel good seeing the Rank gong logo and the Archers bullseye target logo. You know what else I miss? The old UA logo, where the two letters would slowly turn to the camera while the music went from a couple of piano notes to a full orchestral crescendo. They should have never gotten rid of that.

And Jim, don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.

Speaking of preferring the representation to the thing itself (in a kind of, sort of roundabout way) I remember reading Helter Skelter too and the images of the murdered bodies were all whited out. Now I don't know if it had the same effect on Matt but that somehow produced a much more eerie effect than actually seeing the corpses without photographic touch-ups. Years later on the internet I finally saw the pictures untouched with no whiting out and they didn't have the same effect on me as the ones from the book. The pictures in the book had created a representation of what had happened that had produced a deeper shock in me than the actual photos would years later.

And for me, Matt, it's Piggies. I can't hear that song without thinking about the Manson family.

Actually, the way it came about was that I had the post written, then I bought Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 and decided to do the video thing. I tried to use the built in "Add Narration" button, but it caused it to crash. So I ended up just using "Sound Recorded" that comes with Windows and my headset. Then I imported the wave and overlayed the visuals.

The Shawshank Redemption - I saw it in the theater my junior year of high school, and more powerfully than any other other work I've ever seen/read, it reminded me that no matter how dark things may seem, there is always a chance, through perserverance and ingenuity, that you can one day find yourself on the beach in Mexico, so to speak. Watching it again and again is indeed like revisiting a cherished friend.

I realize that this movie may not reach the lofty artistic heights in the film pantheon that some others mentioned here do (at least not to most people) ... but to me, Pleasantville fit that bill. That was very personal to me. I wrote an essay about it at the time:

http://www.thewodons.com/essays/view.php?eid=9

I've always felt like an odd man out because I don't have much nostalgia for my adolescent years. I had a wonderful, happy childhood/adolescence so it's not like I'm trying to forget that time, but I just didn't do much "taste-forming" then, at least not in regards to then-current pop culture. I had no connection to it. I grew up in the 80s and have ZERO nostalgia for 80s music. I never listened to it. I did glom onto the Beatles during that time, and they remain one of my favorite groups but they've probably been supplanted by the Ramones or maybe even the Dead Kennedys who I did not discover until I was an adult.

The same is true of my fim tastes. Quentin Tarantino hit right at the very end of my "adolescent window" and at the very beginning of my "cinephilic window" and there was a time when I numbered both "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" among my Top 10 films. Along with "Natural Born Killers." Today I think NBK is absolute trash, and I find Pulp Fiction does not wear very well upon multiple viewings. Reservoir Dogs holds up the best and is still an impressive film, but it no longer holds a warm place in my heart. Odd for one of the films that first stoked my film obsession.

If I look at my current Top 10, there is only 1 film (Taxi Driver) that I saw before the age of 25. The story isn't much different for my Top 100.

Perhaps my "adolescent window" of cinephilia didn't open until I hit my mid-20s. That's about the time I started doing things like printing out Roger's Great Movies list and seeing as many as I could. I didn't really start caring about movies passionately until then.

If I have any lingering pop culture nostalgia from my biological adolescence, it's probably in regards to TV shows. "Star Trek" was a passion while growing up and remains so (REAL Star Trek, not the non-Shatner stuff). "Get a Life" and "Married with Children" are still two of the funniest TV shows I've ever seen, though I'd be willing to bet I wouldn't find either one of them funny if I encoutnered them for the first time today. And I still watch "The A Team" whenever it's on.

I wonder if the reason my adolescent nostalgia lingers on television as opposed to music or film is because I pretty much just stopped caring about TV after I hit my 20s. I'm sure there was/is plenty of great stuff on TV since then. I don't watch it. Thus, there was nothing "mature" to replace the adolescent stuff, so the old stuff remained priveleged.

How does this connect to the ecstatic truth (oh, now there's a flashback to a year spend wrestling with Herzog's documentary films for my graduate thesis)? I have no idea. Those magical moments where I felt my consciousness expand, where I felt the funamental "a-ha" reaction, came almost entirely from films I saw as an adult. Many of them Herzog's. In fact, he was the post-Tarantino start for me, and he does still remain one of my very favorite directors.

I've talked about The Bad News Bears before but when I saw it at 14 it was a revelation to me that a movie could be hilarious and suspenseful and have a deeper meaning, too. Sure, it wasn't a new message but it was the first time it didn't make me roll my eyes. It was as if someone had channeled my ideas about sports into a film. That gave me a feeling of empowerment.

At about 16 I discovered Bob Dylan and have been trying to really discover him ever since (as much as this idea would make *him* roll *his* eyes). Tomorrow I'll be seeing the Todd Haynes film.

Next came the Velvet Underground who I could have lived my whole life without stumbling over. Thankfully, they have music critics, too, and after having my eyes opened by reading movie reviews I started to read about music.

The Deer Hunter (at 17) was the first film that really just completely absorbed me, and made me stagger out of the theater as if shellshocked. I didn't understand everything then and don't like all of it now but it was a new kind of experience--the idea that you might have to talk about the movie after with words other than just: "Wow, that was so cool!"

And the first book that I picked up on my own that made me feel like an adult (there were plenty in school) was Beyond the Bedroom Wall by Larry Woiwode which made me feel that the lives of the most ordinary people, written about beautifully and from deep inside were more important to me than a great "story". It didn't get me off Stephen King right away, but it widened my horizons. Oh, and Lorrie Moore's short stories were another big discovery of the same sort.

this reminds me of something i read from joseph campbell a few years ago. i'm paraphrasing since i don't have the book on me, and i'm sure i'm doing it badly. but when asked how someone can have a mystic experience without religion, campbell said the easiest way to do it is to find your favorite author (insert filmmaker, musician, etc); and read everything the author wrote. then, find out who the author loved, and read everything by his/her favorite writers. then, find their favorite writers, etc. the idea being that you would follow a thought in time through various people and places; and i suppose this thought would follow you. i thought it was a nice quote, and this post reminded me of it.

In many ways, my entire blog is really devoted to the "ecstatic truths" I saw through my "adolescent window." I would add that my own window was opened up much earlier and includes films and TV shows I saw when I was only a child of eight or even seven years old (Frankenstein, James Bond in Goldfinger, The Magnificent Seven, the original Pink Panther, etc.) as well as the books my parents read to me (Little Women, The Velveteen Rabbit, comic books, etc.)

David Bordwell's piece reminds me a lot of the previous Adrian Martin article you linked too. It's fascinating to consider how much we're all products of our upbring and experiences. My father deeply loved movies and his influence over me is unmeasurable, but I've really only realized that in recent years.