One pleasure of the modern age is the opening up of movie viewing via YouTube.  I've been able to see films I heard of in the past, but were remote from me except during the international film series presented at the local university in the 1980s.  Then, I took every opportunity to see movies that just weren't playing on television.  I remember getting into an argument with my brother, realizing it was Wednesday, and leaving the house in an emotional broil, walking to the student union to see Kenji Mizoguchi's masterpiece Ugetsu Monogatari projected onto a small screen in a big lunch room with no slope to the floor.  The sometimes less than ideal circumstances of these viewings were
counterbalanced by the enlightenment gained by seeing the films themselves.
     I saw Alphaville, my first Jean-Luc Godard movie, in that room.  My father found it tedious, I was mesmerized.  The screening of Fellini's La Dolce Vita was packed, but as that long film unfolded, people left in twos and threes until finally, during the movie's astounding powerful final moments, I was the only audience member left in the room.
     I'm a real dedicated nut when it comes to watching deceptively difficult movies.  Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fascinating psychodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant held me in one position in my chair for its entire length.  I like watching movies others complain about.  So-called "slow" movies strike me more as cinematic works that reflect what life is really like.  As the director Samuel Fuller, playing himself in a cameo in Godard's Pierrot le fou, puts it, movies are above all about emotion.  Explosions, fast edits throughout, no depth in character development, allow for little expression of emotion in films.
     As a young man recently out of high school I began purposely studying movies and directors.  I read book after book about filmmakers and histories of moviemaking in countries all over the world.  Not having seen any movies by Yasujiro Ozu, I nevertheless read a book about him, but many years passed before I saw any of his films, Tokyo Story being one of the greatest I've ever seen.  Alain Resnais was another director I read up on cold without  seeing his work until much later.  I managed to see several films of the West German postwar directors: Volker Schlondorff, Werner Herzog, Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders.  Other movies I read about with fascination eluded me for decades, until YouTube, which has allowed me to see Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterpiece Medea,
Antonioni's Red Desert, and many others.
     I'm haunted, though, by some still images I saw in books I studied in the 1980s, including a shot from a Bulgarian film, Iconostasis.  I can't remember what was written about it, but that image from the film imprinted itself in my mind: a long line of people stretched serpentine-like to the horizon, in snow, trudging towards the camera.  Boosted by the enigmatic title, Iconostasis, a yearning to see it grew inside me so that when I later saw Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part One, I was gripped by the image of a long winding line of people in a snowscape, coming to demonstrate their fealty to the exiled monarch.  That image, fraught with the emotion Samuel Fuller speaks of in the Godard film, shows what movies can do when a filmmaker uses the world as a studio, harmonizing acting,
real natural and urban settings, and the relatable veracity of lived-in spaces.

                                                                           Vic Neptune