A masterclass in cinema

It is an uphill struggle to get my Film students to post regularly and appropriately to the blogs they are required to keep as a 'Process Journal' reflecting on their work and their growing knowledge of cinema. But occasionally one or two of them will produce a really impressive effort on the blog (which encourages me to hope that one day, maybe, everyone could attain to something nearer that).

I have one lad at the moment, Dan, a very quiet and thoughtful student, who makes me swoon with delight whenever I look at his blog. 

For one thing, he has some sense of visual design - he actually takes some trouble to make it look good. (I emphasise to all my students that film is a visual medium, and that, if they want to demonstrate their grasp of that on their blog, it would help if they could also display some visual flair of their own in its presentation - or at least a basic awareness of what looks good and what doesn't.)

Even more inspiring to me, though, is that he's obviously got a genuine passion for the medium, and for its history. He's about the only person who's working through the whole of the DVD section of classic films I set up in our Library - including the old black-and-white ones like Jules et Jim, A Bout De Souffle, Rififi, Bicycle Thieves, and La Strada.

And he turns up some great resources online. Just recently, he found this marvellous analysis of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (which I was moved to show to the rest of the class, although it's not directly relevant to what we're doing at the moment - thanks, Dan).

This reminds me of an incident about a dozen years ago, when I was teaching at the Beijing Normal University. There were some very good pirate DVD shops in the university districts of the city back then, and I found one quite nearby on the North 3rd Ringroad that had a particularly good selection of non-English-language films. On one visit there, I was astounded to discover an entire shelf devoted to Kurosawa - some dozens of titles, most of which I'd never heard of. I couldn't afford to buy them all at one go, but I was looking forward to being able to build up a comprehensive collection of the master's work over the next few months. For the moment, I contented myself with picking up a handful of his best-known films - Yojimbo, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Kagemusha. When I returned a few days later, the Kurosawa shelf was almost completely EMPTY; they'd sold out the entire catalogue in under a week. I asked how soon they were going to re-stock. "Oh, we probably won't get any more of him. He's not very popular," they claimed, mystifyingly. Hence, I am guiltily aware that I am still not nearly as familiar with Kurosawa's work as I ought to be. I still have a lot of catching up to do.