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Culture Of Film

At this point in my life I am finally able to appreciate many different films that in the past was not mature enough to understand. It has been a long journey getting to this point. My entire life nothing has made me as happy as going to see a movie in a theater with a big cherry coke. As a consumer I am open to seeing almost any film, because no matter what you see there is something you can learn or just be entertained. Films can be dissected in so many ways; even a terrible flop at the box office can be worth seeing to examine what went wrong. There are so many questions to examine to understand what went into the making of the film. Even if a film is terrible it can end up making a lot of money, which just seems wrong on so many levels. But to understand where I am as a consumer of film lets go back to where things really started.
The beginning of my real career as a student of film began my senior year of high school. A simply impossible man taught the class, he would give out the hardest assignments to a bunch of teenagers who had no clue what was going on. Looking back I owe him a lot, he started me on looking at film instead of movies.
The syllabus looks more like that of a college class. It was a chronological look at film, which was a good way to get started. We looked at the films of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and The Tramp. Learning about the birth of an industry was great, to see where film came from and how everything is influenced by the films that have come before it. From there is was on to German Expressionism and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the Russian films of Pudovkin and Eisenstein. These are the ones which pushed me the most. Charlie Chaplin you could empathize with, but how does an American teenager relate to films about the Bolshevik uprising? I barely knew what happened. But seeing the films inspired me to look into the history of what made them.
Its not important to talk about the rest of the films I...