Merry Wanderer of the Night:
film essays

A couple of weeks ago we watched a film called Chekhov For Children in my essay film class. Out of everything we've watched so far this semester it is probably my favorite film. The actual film is 74 minutes long and difficult to get ahold of because it's an essay film and not something you would see in a movie theater. If you're at the University of Iowa or in the area you should go see it at the Bijou Theater between December 10 and 14. Visit their website for more details on that screening. The film is about the director, Sasha Waters Freyer, and her experience in a New York public school where her class worked with Phillip Lopate (a god of essays) on a production of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya. Anyone who knows anything about Anton Chekhov realizes that a play by him is probably incredibly difficult for students in the fifth grade to put on. Lopate wrote an essay about this experience as well with the same title as the film.

While the film is about Sasha Waters Freyer, it is also not. She is rarely present in front of the camera and the majority of the film is interviews with other students who were involved with the production, interviews with Phillip Lopate, and video footage Freyer took in elementary school when she filmed the play. There are also videos the children made in elementary school during that time Lopate was present. It's amazing in the video to see these children working with really complex ideas and it shows just how aware kids really are of the world around them. There is also a sense of nostalgia for the time Freyer grew up but also a sense of pride for the people who came out of that production.

Since I obviously can't show you the entire film I thought I'd show you the trailer and a section of the film I find particularly essayistic, even though Freyer isn't speaking in it.

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For my film and essay class we had to read the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate. The introduction made reference to several essays that are in the book, most of which I had never read before. Until I came across one, The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Lopate made reference to that essay I exclaimed, "This book has The Crack-Up in it?!?!?!" You can ask my boyfriend, this is a true story. I was thrilled because The Crack-Up was one of the first essays I read and loved, way back in high school, and it was also one of the first times that I realized that essays were the genre I was reading and writing so much. So The Crack-Up holds a very special place in my heart, and I think you all will enjoy it as well.

The essay is basically about hitting rock bottom and what comes with that. Like a growing hatred for everything. I would also say the essay is a bit about being so much part of the time you grew-up in or the time you loved in your life (for Fitzgerald this would probably be the 1920's) and then trying to adjust to time when you are still the person you were during that important time of your life. This is something my mom has talked about before. She grew-up mostly during the 1960's and she often talks about how she can't really understand the world she lives in now because it is so different from the one she grew-up in. This isn't an overt part of the essay and it might not even be something Fitzgerald intended us to see, but it's something that I have taken from the essay. So here is a bit:

As the twenties passed, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets- at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war- resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life seemed to solve themselves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.

Life, ten years ago, was largely as personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed"- and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills- domestic, professional and personal- then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center- things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too but: "Up to forty-nine it'll be all right," I said."I can count on that. For a man who's lived as I have, that's all you could ask."

-And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.

You can read this essay on Esquire's website, where the essay was originally published. It's about ten pages long in print.

I would also like to share this short film essay, it's only five minutes long. It's an interview between a 14-year-old Beatles fan and John Lennon in Toronto, 1969. A few years ago John Raskin and the boy in the interview, Jerry Levitan, worked with two illustrators to create this really interesting visual representation of the interview.