22 december 2021
Just making it past the longest night of the year feels like a triumph. Not that I was ever in danger, really--my depression is well-managed, but there's a buzz of suicidal ideation at the back of my mind most of the time, and this time of year is the prime time for feeling hopeless. But I've passed through it, like everyone else in the northern hemisphere, and now the days are going to get longer again. When I was younger I thought I preferred the dark over the sunlight, but as it turns out, I need those daylight hours. I need some sunlight on my skin to remind me that I exist after all.
As a holiday gift to myself and my household, I've finally ponied up for a year of the Criterion Channel. If you're not aware of it, Criterion is the company that puts out deluxe Bluray and DVD editions of a curated collection of films, both old and new. A lot of art house stuff, but along with it some things you'd not expect, like Robocop or Michael Bay's The Rock. I'm a fan. For decades now I've gone to an annual film series tied to a local university, but the last couple years they have been, for obvious reasons, not running the program. In that same time I've been watching a lot of TV, mostly animation and fantasy series, which I enjoy, but to a degree it feels like junk food. It's easy to digest. Sometimes I crave something a little more complex.
That's probably easily misconstrued as talking shit about TV, that it's more shallow than film or something. Which I guess is part of what I'm implying. But it's not intended as an insult, really. They're different media with different purposes. TV's strength is short-form stories and serialization, and until recently, it wasn't really possible to put something on TV that wasn't financed by some network or cable channel, which have to worry about ratings and on-air decency rules. As a result there's less variety in it.
So I'm excited to get access to the Criterion Collection again, outside of the DVDs I already own. Not everything in their collection is available on streaming, and not everything they stream is in their collection, but I was browsing through the offerings yesterday. They're mouthwatering. Film has long been a way that I expanded the size of my world, and my world feels so much smaller after nearly two years of staying home, no travel, not even much restaurant food. Nothing new, nothing exotic, two years of sleepwalking through life. At least this is a little window into something else, until something else becomes available in real life.
Last night I watched my inaugural film on the service, Son of the White Mare, a 1981 Hungarian animated film based on a series of traditional folktales. It's a beautiful movie, visually, and it has the odd dreamlike structure of all folk stories and fairy tales when you actually read them. It's something I really love about the genre, bound up in the dream-logic of campfire storytelling. Once upon a time. Does the story have a moral? Not really--the best ones don't. The film itself is worth watching, a lovely experience in itself.