Film and Books

I'll start off by saying I really loved this little film. Being both an English and a Film student I loved seeing how they could be used together to support one another. I can't help feel a little amused when I see or hear about a film about books (and they are few) To me, it seems that these two fictional mediums are sometimes at war with one another; film can seem to turn books or reading into an assignment or chore. But that's a whole different blog.

The first thing that happened to me as I watched this film was I was brought whooshing (yes, whooshing) back to my childhood years of playing dress up. Whenever I played dress-up, (which let me tell you, was often) I always had these two old books tucked in my purse or rolled up in a scarf. You know those real books, those old cloth covered books with tiny print and old sketched pictures. Well, to this day I don't know what they were about, but by god I can remember their colors and what parts they played in my magical little girl world. Old books carry with them a sense of mystisism. Like they might be the spellbook of some old wizard or the diary of a queen...or maybe I have problems with growing up. But what I do know is, when ever you place an old, tattered book in someones hands, they hold it as if it was the most delicate spun glass. And, even if they don't admit it, they feel a surge of pure romantic power tingle through their finger tips as they carefully turn the yellow-old pages.


The second thing I thought about was the innocence of children question. What are we expecting our children to be, or to become. It seems so shocking to us to see how the books for and directed at children (because, yes, there is a difference) focus on the issue of death and other bodily harm. I heard a-many a gasps during the dark limericks and poems. But think about television and if people of the past saw how, instead of death, we hurl sex and violence at our youth. True death was much more prominent and "in your face" back in the day, what with poorer living conditions, medical care, and shorter life spans, but does that mean sex is more prominent now? Do children have to deal with the sexual acts of their family like they do a death? (ok that's a weird way to go...but it's too late now!)

Society has always been telling our youth what do think, how to act, and what to believe in. And fear used to be a pretty darn good way of doing it. Fear the wolf , the stranger, the trouble maker, the inconvenience. Save the heathen; teach they our way, and much like how poetry should imitate the worse to prove a point of illustrate a moral, do those little children's tales those fables, show the naughty child as wrong and the goody two shoes as an angel.
The fact that this was a film on books, on lost literature, plays nicely with my evolution of the tools of propaganda But a books on films doesn't hold the same tiny jewel of (nerdy) irony as does a film on books.