I didn’t get much sleep that night.
I was a bit hungover, my neck was hurting, and I was quite busy.
Keeping all that in mind, I don’t think any level of readiness would have prepared me for what I endured Sunday at the IU Cinema.
“Shoah,” the harrowing and mostly subtitled Holocaust documentary approaching 10 hours in length, proved to be the roughest, most demanding cinematic marathon of my life.
And yet, I’m more than glad to have experienced it. “Shoah” is a masterpiece no doubt, but where most people would feel as though they were sitting (or napping) through hell, even the most torturous movies provide for me a sort of solace many don’t know.
The film by French born director Claude Lanzmann asks tough questions, paints horrid visuals through testimonials alone and educates to an unspeakable degree. While Lanzmann’s main goal is to document everything that surrounds the Holocaust and to keep fighting and speaking until the last surviving Jew is standing, ultimately “Shoah” is a film that basks an unexpected scope and perspective on something we’re all very familiar with.
That theme for me encapsulates how I feel about the movies, especially ones like “Shoah” that only a real cinephile can appreciate.
They’re movies: art yes, but entertainment first. For some, if not most people, that’s enough. But I love and hate movies enough to demand more from them.
What I crave is to immerse myself in the picture, to get away from my problems, even if that means embracing someone else’s.
And it’s not even just escaping to a fantasy as all people do with entertainment. There comes a point when the ideas of the movie meld with my own, and all the film’s beauty, ugliness and artfulness attain real world significance.
When I do intellectually engage with a movie on that level, I achieve a state of reverie. I leave the theater speechless and yet simultaneously buzzing with thoughts.
As an example, I came out of the excellent “Drive” this weekend feeling alive. Here is yet another film that, with its gritty noir setting and stylish hyper violence, is not precisely light entertainment.
I jumped in my car and wanted to gun my stick shift rapidly down Highway 37, but I instead returned to my empty apartment, found no one to discuss the film with and felt immediately depressed.
The mundane problems of my work, school, social and romantic lives all returned instantly. I had sadly been feeling this way all weekend, and after finally pulling myself away to the movies for once, it occurred to me I barely had time to transpose those buzzing thoughts and criticisms of “Drive” into a review.
What I realized sitting squeamish through both “Drive” and “Shoah” was a sensation not completely uncommon from the ones at the end of a good workout, a moving song or even having sex with someone you love.
It was the feeling of embracing, engaging and braving the unknown, achieving even just a quick moment outside of time and space and carrying the weight of something difficult and painful with near levity.
Why does an athlete push their body to its limits in the pool, on a bike or on a run? Why does a music fan spin an album that doesn’t make them want to dance but scream out or send a shiver down their spine? Why does a person in love suffer through cheating, separation or worse?
It’s not just adrenaline, and it’s not just escapism. We need to feel and know pain other than our own, and not the kind that comes from inactivity.
Maybe it’s crazy to want to feel hurt, but I think to truly love anything or anyone, you have to be just a little crazy.