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Life As We Show It: Writing on Film

by Brian Pera (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Masha Tupitsyn (Goodreads Author) (Editor)

4.47 · rating details · 15 ratings · 3 reviews

“Twenty-five writers discuss attachments they formed for certain movies—ET, Shane and Rosemary's Baby acquire new significance and resonance after reading these inspired pieces of narrative nonfiction.”—John McFarland for Shelf AwarenessFeminist critic and award-winning fiction writer Masha Tupitsyn and filmmaker/writer Brian Pera edit this dynamic collection of essays, sh...more

Paperback, 300 pages

Published June 1st 2009 by City Lights Publishers

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Feb 16, 2010

Benito Vergara rated it

I was really looking forward to picking up this book -- movies being a passionate interest of mine -- but found it to be a rather uneven collection. Organized, kind of, around the provocative question "if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?", Life as We Show It features pieces that use "films and the culture that comes with it, as an ingredient for narrative impetus", as coeditor Masha Tu...moreI was really looking forward to picking up this book -- movies being a passionate interest of mine -- but found it to be a rather uneven collection. Organized, kind of, around the provocative question "if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?", Life as We Show It features pieces that use "films and the culture that comes with it, as an ingredient for narrative impetus", as coeditor Masha Tupitsyn puts it.

One or two essays are almost full-blown academic papers that are explicitly engaged with film history and theory; some have little to do with even cinema at all. Sometimes knowledge of the film being discussed is (probably) crucial to appreciate the piece (and therefore, my non-appreciation); sometimes it's not. Creative nonfiction, a screenplay, poetry: it sounds like a fairly open-ended Call for Papers -- both to its advantage and disadvantage -- and the fragmentary, journal-entry nature of some of the pieces only helps to underscore the looseness of the collection. (Granted, the fragments do mimic the way in which cinema seeps into our dreams and flickers at the edges of our everyday consciousness: in half-remembered scenes, in random bits of dialogue.) But one person's "fluid and limber" is another person's "disorganized". Eye of the beholder and all, no pun intended.

On the other hand, the more substantial pieces are really well-crafted: Kevin Killian, on seeing one of his students in a porn video; Wayne Koestenbaum, on Elizabeth Taylor (but then, it's Wayne Koestenbaum we're talking about here, whose capacity to meld sometimes stunning critical acuity with campy hilarity is probably second to none); Veronica Gonzalez, on Herzog (barely), tourism and marriage; Tupitsyn, on the bodies of Ralph Macchio and Jamie Lee Curtis; Richard Grayson's "The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County", on the ephemeral life of suburban theaters; and Myriam Gurba watching Kids and remembering herown traumatic adolescence.

Best piece, hands down: Dodie Bellamy's "Phone Home", a piece prompted by Bellamy's E.T. What follows is a heartbreaking, almost obsessive examination of the film (and crucially, the DVD extras) as a way of working through her grief.

A good chunk of the book (sorry, I don't have my copy in front of me, and it may even be more than half) deals with love and sex -- limiting at first glance, but actually superbly appropriate. For what other medium lets us sate our scopophilia so easily, letting us hungrily consume (and vice-versa) the larger-than-life objects of our desire, with strangers in the dark?(less)

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Jul 02, 2010

Amy rated it

Life As We Show It is a unique collection of essays, imagined scripts, and personal reflections by more than 20 writers on how film has shaped much of their lives and their opinions. Not all of the cited films are blockbusters, and the influential titles are not meant to gather a "best of" collection like you'd find on A&E. Rather, these movies are personal touchstones, relevant in ways that are unique and sometimes perplexing. Some titles are virtually unknown, and the focus isn't ...moreLife As We Show It is a unique collection of essays, imagined scripts, and personal reflections by more than 20 writers on how film has shaped much of their lives and their opinions. Not all of the cited films are blockbusters, and the influential titles are not meant to gather a "best of" collection like you'd find on A&E. Rather, these movies are personal touchstones, relevant in ways that are unique and sometimes perplexing. Some titles are virtually unknown, and the focus isn't so much on the film but the viewer's reaction to it or to the memories it evokes.

The standout essay for me was Rebecca Brown's title "My Western", a fascinating and multi-layered investigation into several western movies, her own family's history, and the concept of 'happily ever after'. Her signficant film is Shane, the western classic that is mostly known for its lines "Come back! Shane, come back!" The young boy is brokenhearted watching Shane leave. Brown combines both plot details and anecdotes from the real-life actors with events of her own life, particularly that of her father. She finds parallels in the lives and deaths of both her father's disappearance and Shane's. The effect is stunning, making the film seem more personal, and notes the synchronicity between real life and film that is often forgotten. With Shane and other westerns, she connects that usually unspoken need we have for a hero.

She writes: "A classic western sunset and a stranger on a horse is passing through. We fall in love. With him and with the stories we imagine he could tell but won't. We fill his secret past with our desires and the things we are afraid we cannot do. We do not want to know what he is not. The stories we will tell of him will save us from our lies."

She doesn't end it there, however. She makes an impassioned argument on why Shane had to leave, and why a happy ending was impossible. The boy wanted him to come back, but he was wounded and near death. If he came back, it would only serve to traumatize the boy more; coming back to die in the child's arms wouldn't satisfy the audience either. And so it is with other classic films, such as ET (which is addressed in another essay by Dodie Bellamy): ET had to go home, could it really have ended with him becoming a member of the family? I immediately thought of Citizen Kane in a similar light: Rosebud had to be burned in the fire, if it been preserved as a museum piece, the film would never have become as iconic. The ending required a loss.

Elizabeth Taylor is a topic of an essay by Wayne Koestenbaum, where he muses on her different roles, her costars, and her personal life, and how all three collided in various ways to create the icon she has become. Some of it is gossipy and silly, and much of it is tragic. I had never realized how many of her costars died tragically, but the point of his essay isn't simply a biography from a fan. It's an explanation of what it means to be a survivor "and how to endure division."

To be clear, many of the essays have far more to do with the writer than the films themselves, so it's not a title that is aimed at a film student. It is an interpretation through their eyes and based on their lives and their own personal loves and losses.
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Sep 29, 2009

City Lights rated it

"This cross-genre collection unites 25 writers and thinkers to explore the cinematic experience and the film-viewer relationship via short stories, essays, and poetry. The texts play with the idea that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating? Pera is an author as well as a film director. Tupitsyn is a fiction writer and cultural critic." —Book News Inc.

"The movie has ...more"This cross-genre collection unites 25 writers and thinkers to explore the cinematic experience and the film-viewer relationship via short stories, essays, and poetry. The texts play with the idea that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating? Pera is an author as well as a film director. Tupitsyn is a fiction writer and cultural critic." —Book News Inc.

"The movie has long since passed the book as the primary method of American storytelling. Life as We Show It: Writing on Film is a blend of fiction and ponderings on film from many well known writers who offer their ideas on the concept of life imitating art. The result is intruiging, thought-provoking and high entertaining. Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn have put together quite a volume, making Life as We Show It a uniquely recommended read." —Midwest Book Review

Film Comment
"Life as We Show It, an anthology of essays, screenplays, and stories about watching movies. . . has the virtue of not treating life and cinema as obvious antagonists. . . One of the pleasures of this collection is that writing about movie viewing produces a cheerful and salutary indifference to conventional judgements of a film's 'importance'. . . 'Phone Home,' [is:] Dodie Bellamy's story of her preoccupation with E.T. when her mother was dying of lung cancer. To watch as cinema’s most famous stranded alien becomes by turns a figure for the narrator’s alienation from her mother’s body through illness and age, the alienation of the able bodied from boys like Matthew De Meritt, the boy with no legs who helped bring E.T. to life by walking on his hands, and finally an opportunity to reflect on what alien technologies like cinema can do to repair these rifts—is to have one’s own ideas about how and why films matter to us completely and productively overturned. " —Nicola Evans

Chroma

"Life as We Show It is everything that being published by City Lights suggest it will be: a diverse range of voices from New Queer (mainly West Coast) writing, including fan favourites Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Rebecca Brown, Lynne Tillman, Robert Glück, David Trinidad and Abdekkah Taïa. . . The finest pieces in the book – by Bellamy, Killian, Brown, Taïa and poet Fanny Howe – step beyond that Gen X campness, practised to the highest order in a sonata pathetique on Elizabeth Taylor by Wayne Koestenbaum. . . Not so much Life as We Show It as Cinema as It Shows Us." —Sophie Mayer

Library Journal

"The connection between the movie and the viewer has grown more intimate than ever in recent years. No longer forced to leave the house to experience the great pleasures of the genre, viewers can now watch films—then watch them again and again—at their leisure. This collection of short stories, essays, and poetry compiled by Pera (Troublemaker) and Tupitsyn (Beauty Talk & Monsters) examines what it means to experience the world through the cinema. Starting by considering what kind of movies our lives are imitating, 25 authors, including Lynne Tillman, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Robert Gluck, show that movies have influenced the image of self and that what humans fear in movies reflects what humans fear in life. Exceedingly personal and usually provocative, the pieces included here represent our collective history with film. VERDICT: Recommended for film studies students and scholars as well as adventurous and creative film buffs." —Pam Kingsbury
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