70’s Cinema, Comic Books, and Russian Literature
I remember watching an Akira Kurosawa interview where he talks about where he gets most of his inspiration. One of the things that he talks about is how important it is to open your mind up to anything and everything in order to find the right inspiration for a story. For filmmakers, it isn’t about the number of movies you watch. It’s about the story you tell, and that story can come from anywhere. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I try to draw inspiration wherever I can, whether that’s music, photography, or film. I have already talked about a few of my favorite musicians in a previous post. In this post, I will try to talk about how various forms of art have inspired my own, including forms of art beyond film.
Starting off, I will start with some of my favorite films, some of which come from the 1970’s. Two of my favorite directors, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, made some of their most important films during this decade, including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. During my freshman year of college, I took a class that explored the various films of the 1970s. These paranoid and depressing films reflected the American history during that time period, but I see this same paranoia and depression in our society today. Politics aside, these films focused on the struggle between the individual and society, often resorting to surrealism in order to explore the psychologies of these characters. Personally, as someone who has suffered from depression and grew up in a lower income household, I find these films scarily relevant in my life. Therefore, it makes sense that my art is somewhat surreal and very personal in nature because I often find myself going against society’s norms, as well as conventional art’s norms.
From Dark Knights Metal
Comic books are a more recent influence of mine, stemming from my time working at a comic book shop in Union Square. It is here that I gained a great appreciation for comics as stories as well as images. They blend image and text like what we did with the first project, but they go beyond by telling a story. At times, comics can feel like a movie trapped within pages, transporting the reader beyond our reality to the absurd. Personally, I love superhero comics, and Batman (who isn’t an actual superhero) is my favorite of them all. The Dark Knight comics often explore themes of existentialism, justice, and isolation, touching on topics of mental illness and violence in our society. However, my favorite thing about Batman is his persistence. While the themes and topics of Batman comics are often reflected in my own art (via narratives, films, or photos), the persistence of the character is one that I have applied to my own life, especially as I move into adulthood.
Who is my favorite author? Fyodor Dostoevsky. Does that surprise anyone? Probably not. I consider myself an avid reader, and I often read up to 10 books throughout the course of three months. While I love reading books from various genres, 19th century Russian literature is a weird obsession of mine. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are among my favorite authors because of their proto-existentialist teachings spread throughout their massive novels. I do not consider myself religious, but, after reading something like War and Peace or Brothers Karamazov, I sometimes question whether I would be happier believing in religion or believing in science. While it has been a while since I’ve read anything from that era or region, I often find myself thinking about the ideas of these authors who have seemingly transcended their times.
