Marly Kurtzer – Page 11 – MarlyK's Ramblings

A Rant About Reality in Art

I like movies that are an experience, that take you to a different emotional realm, whether through visuals or narrative. I’m not into reality. In fact, I don’t consider “realism” a valid criticism unless I’m making a documentary. But I don’t make documentaries. I write stories.

When I was a friendless kid with an abusive stepfather and being teased relentlessly at school, I didn’t want to live in reality because it was unbearable. There was not a waking moment in which I wasn’t reading (even if it was the back of an aspirin bottle), watching a movie, or creating my own intricate movie in my head. Books, movies, and daydreaming saved my life. If it sounds melodramatic, then you don’t remember what it was like to be a kid. Children lack all perspective because they’re experiencing everything for the first time. So, yes, childhood experiences are truly intense and over the top. This is why you have to be so very tender with kids; every experience they have is magnified times ten.

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Marathon Movie-Viewing: Powell and Pressburger

As far as I’m concerned, a chilly Sunday is the perfect day to stay indoors for a movie-marathon session while drinking hot chocolate. (Return to your workout tomorrow.) What better way to immerse yourself in a master filmmaker’s work? Today I suggest the sumptuously gorgeous movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, aka The Archers.

Together Powell and Pressburger wrote, directed and produced 19 movies, of which many are considered masterpieces and influenced many great filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese.^[*] Their films are characterized by a masterful use of color that heightens the story’s emotional thrust. There’s a dreamy, surrealistic quality to their work and the effect verges on the hallucinatory, especially when viewed on the big screen. If you’re looking for quiet, understated filmmaking, you’ve got the wrong team. This is melodrama at its most emotionally satisfying. As a woman, I also find the main characters in I Know Where I’m Going!, The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus interesting and compelling studies of women’s complex emotional world.
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6 Sources for Story Ideas When the Well Runs Dry

You know how it is. There are days when your head is buzzing with great stories… And then there are days when your mind goes blank. You’ve run out of ideas. Now what?

Woodcut from an 1840 edition of Jack the Giant Killer, reprinted in Iona and Peter Opie’s The Classic Fairy Tales

My first suggestion is to stop surfing the internet. It’s a fantastic resource if you want to find out what everyone else is reading, what’s going viral, what’s the pulse of the people. But when you’re looking for a story that’s unique, strange, or that just hasn’t been told, a search engine won’t help you much, if only because, what drives the web is traffic. And you’re looking for something off the beaten path. Yup.

It’s time to opt out of the virtual and go back to actual reality by getting a hold of the following three-dimensional sources:

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12 Ways to Make Yourself Write When You’re Not Feeling It

EH-C6143D — “The first draft of anything is shit.”
–Ernest Hemingway

Writing is one of those things that, like exercise, we avoid even though we know we’ll feel so much better once it’s over. Why do we hear so much about writer’s block, but hardly ever about dancer’s freeze, or composer’s silence, or any other kind of artistic paralysis? Any ideas? Whatever the reason, we’ve all experienced that reluctance to sit at our desks and put words on paper.

Here are some thoughts on overcoming that resistance:
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How Would Lubitsch Do It?

Last week I wrote about Billy Wilder’s life and how it can inspire us to get through some of the emotional obstacles we face as writers. One of the things I admire about Wilder was his ability to continually learn from the masters, in his case, from his mentor Ernst Lubitsch. Every Wilder fan has heard about the famous Lubitsch touch, but what did Wilder mean by it? Here’s a great video in which Billy Wilder himself explains it:

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