I Am a Wimp

I confess to the following:

• I have never seen (or have wanted to see) any of the Scream movies, any of the Halloween movies, The Ring, Van Helsing, Elm Street — and I could go on.
• I do not like roller coasters or other carnival rides that toss my skeleton in one direction and my digestive tract in another. The last one I was on was the ride at Magic Mountain, and I only rode that one because my evil stepdaughter told me it was an easy kid’s ride.

AND YET, there I was at the Neil Hellman Library on Tuesday night to watch Nosferatu, the granddaddy of vampire films. The audience of 30 students and staff — many in costumes — were treated to an introduction to the film by Professor Kelly Meyer. He set the movie in its historical context and set out a list of things for us to watch for, including the framing of scenes and the use of color. While the rats in the film obviously used method acting to depict a high degree of scurviness, the film really wasn’t that scary. (Or perhaps I am not such a wimp after all.) Most of this, I’m sure, can be credited to its age. In the 85 years since its release, filmmakers have discovered many new and gruesome ways to scare their audiences. Most are not using hokey-looking monsters, whose most appalling monster features are bad teeth and big ears.

 

However, the film was a joy to watch. The way it set scenes (on site in Germany, in Orava Castle in Slovakia) was quite interesting. As Professor Meyer stated, this film is an example of expressionism and as such, the director was not interested in depicting reality but in creating moods. With the exception of the rats, the actors over-emoted their feelings and it would have been hard to misinterpret joy and fear.

 

 

Thanks to Kelly Meyer for his introduction and to Kate Moss and Gretchen Ingersoll for coordinating this book and a movie night.

 

 

Frequency North Comes to the Library

The third season of Frequency North begins with David Lehman visiting the Neil Hellman Library on Thursday, October 4 at 7:30 P.M. Lehman is a poet and literary critic; he is also known for beginning an annual series titled Best American Poetry.

POSTSCRIPT – THANKS TO ALL WHO ATTENDED: Despite my worries that the space in the library would not be large enough and noise would create problems, the poetry reading went smoothly. Approximately sixty people heard Mr. Lehman read from his body of poetry, including some from his collections in which he wrote “a poem a day.” He graciously stayed afterwards to chat with those in attendance and signed books (including the seven recently acquired Lehman books for the library collection).

For the many New York Mets fans out there, let me conclude this post with a short excerpt from Lehman’s October 9 poem in his book The Evening Sun:

It’s a great day for New York
thanks to Todd Pratt of the Mets
whose tenth inning homer beat Arizona
so now the Mets will face Atlanta
for the pennant…