Screen Epiphanies

Screen Epiphanies brings together leading film-makers from around the world to reflect on the films that inspired them to pursue a career in cinema or to rethink their own practice. This beautifully-illustrated volume includes contributions from Danny Boyle, Anthony Minghella, Martin Scorsese, Mira Nair and Lars von Trier.

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Back cover quote: Anthony Minghella / The Blue Angel My memory is of this appalling humiliation of a teacher in love with a cabaret performer - Marlene Dietrich. It begins with an extremely curmudgeonly, rather rigid and puritanical school teacher who finds out some of his pupils have been visiting the cabaret. He then pursues them and gets sucked into the life of this cabaret. When he marries Marlene Dietrich, he is then forced to perform in this cabaret. There is a sequence in which he is humiliated by Dietrich and has to go on stage in his clown's make-up. This is all 40 years ago or more that I saw this film. I can only remember glimpses. Shards of this film remain in my mind. What I remember was that it was the first time a piece of fiction had had such a devastating emotional effect on me. A lot of children remember seeing cartoons, Pinocchio or Bambi or something that breaks their heart. I remember seeing The Blue Angel and it breaking my heart. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world - that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally. It might have fed into a whole series of epiphanies about my own upbringing.
I was living in a family where my grandparents had separated in quite complex circumstances. Perhaps it resonated with some elements of that, to do with simply how love can be a rupturing and damaging emotion as well as a healing one. Also, to see somebody who is in an authority position made so small, so diminished, by the feeling of having no control. Inside front flap: 'In a strange, lethal way, I was suddenly wildly attracted to the process of film-making, even though it is described as a nightmare - a matter of horror - in that film. There is a trance-like atmosphere. Suddenly, I was reminded that you can feel like it's a matter of life and death when you make a film. It changed from being a mediocre feeling of emptiness in your life to something that feels necessary. I realised that film-making can be many things - and it can be narcotic in a way. You can become addicted to it.'
Thomas Vinterberg, of Hearts of Darkness Screen Epiphanies brings together 32 leading film-makers to discuss the films that inspired them to pursue a career in the movie business, or which influenced their own film-making practice, or which stayed with them because of their depictions of familiar communities, intense human relationships or unknown worlds. Taken together, their recollections conjure up a lost world of cinema-going, in which there were movie theatres on every street, whether first-run houses or second-run houses, Art Deco dream palaces or fleapits. Film-makers growing up in the 1950s and 60s had a huge appetite for films, partly because there was so little else to do. At the same time, films weren't available to be downloaded, watched on YouTube, paused, rewound and explored again and again. Many of the 'epiphanies' relate to films - or moments in films - that the interviewees saw once only, and remember only incompletely, adding to the intensity of the memories that they conjure up. The film-makers can often recall the precise circumstances in which they saw the movie.
They talk about the wallpaper on the walls of the theatre or the route they took to get to the cinema or even the seats they sat in. The interviewees often talk about their epiphanies in terms of the getting of knowledge. In their childhoods, films were simply 'there,' projected on the screen, as if by magic. Most had little notion that these films were 'made.' Editing, cinematography, sound, lighting, make-up, music, special effects and every other part of the craft was unknown to the young cinemagoers. They saw movies as unmediated, magnified reality. For some, the discovery of the craft and artifice behind the films is a source of disappointment and disillusionment. Like Dorothy when she learns that the Wizard of Oz is just a wizened, tubby man behind a curtain, they feel short-changed. For others, the contrivance is itself magical. They begin to have the sense that they, too, could create something akin to this.
Beautifully illustrated with images from the films discussed, Screen Epiphanies is a thought-provoking and often moving insight into the creative process and the way in which artists are inspired by each other's work, but also into the centrality of cinema in all our lives, and its power to change our ambitions and how we see the world around us.