« The Runaway Bunny | Main | Stingray Sam is alive! »

September 14, 2009

A Brief Academic Excursion

I've been spanning time these past few weeks, never quite managing to find a slipstream in which to write anything. Hence the recent screening of St. Nick at the Langdon Review Weekend has gone unmentioned until now, a few days after the fact. As a wayward academic and one-time English major, I was thrilled to be invited to show the film at this literary conference, and even moreso to be asked to contribute an essay to the institution's annual journal, The Langdon Review.

Of course, as per my usual habit, I rested on the laurels of the invitation itself and put off the actual writing until the day after the piece was due. I wrote most of its 3000 words on a plane to Memphis and fired it off immediately upon landing; and so it was with some relief when, on Friday, I was handed a copy of the beautifully printed journal and found that what I'd written was not completely terrible! I'm revising it a bit for posterity's sake (a future collection of painfully humorless essays?) but, for now, an excerpt:

What else? Though I’ve successfully avoided my circuitous instincts to follow my own Uncle Toby off in pursuit of his hobby horse, I seem to have gone in the opposite direction and skipped over: the entire editing process, one love affair, a bout of depression, trips abroad, workshops and labs and early publicity, lots of running, cold weather and the sheer ebullience of seeing a massive line outside a theater for one’s own premiere, all of which are intrinsic to how this film came to be. But as I consider those details, I’m struck by a strange sense of alienation, of inadequacy. I feel suddenly as if this account has been written not by me, but by a prismatic fraction of myself, whose dim prose can do little to illuminate something which shall remain intransigent and irresolute in this medium. I could write about St. Nick a thousand different ways and still not completely cover what it is, where it came from, what it means, how it happened. I make it sound like it is more than it is, which is not the case. The film is an almost silent, 85 minute tale of a brother and sister on the run, and what I mean to say is: within that is everything I could say about it.

(That Sterne reference is the tip of my name-dropping iceberg - the first paragraph of this beast is a potentially belabored anecdote involving a dogeared copy of My Antonia.)

The screening itself was wonderful. The audience seemed to bring with them none of the preconceived notions I generally project on film festival attendees, and no one asked the one question that everyone always asks. The gathering afterwards, in a little apartment at the top of a narrow staircase, with the heavy skies opening up outdoors and wine flowing just as freely inside, was just so warm and inviting and full of good spirits and conversation that I could have almost - almost - stayed there all night. The whole scene reminded me, in a way, of this quote from (of all places) Roger Ebert's review of the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys:

I thought I would be an English professor. Then I got into this game. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with a sense of loss: I remember myself walking across the snowy campus at dusk, a book bag thrown over my shoulder, on the way to the seminar room to drink coffee and talk about Cather or Faulkner. And I remember the endless weekends, driving around town in somebody's oversized American car, following rumors of parties. And the emotional and romantic confusion that played out at those parties, where everyone was too smart and too loaded and filled with themselves.

That's an ideal I still cherish, and romanticize, and am happy to dip my toes into from time to time.

* * *

The conference was in the charming town of Granbury, about an hour outside of Fort Worth. It was the first time I'd been back in the area since February, and I took the opportunity on the way home to drive by the house we shot St. Nick in. This is what it looks like now...

...complete with happy family.

Posted by David Lowery at September 14, 2009 2:37 PM