Film Endings

The last program I saw was literally called Beginnings and Endings. How appropriate. This is what the festival called a Masters Class. That is a special class by an industry professional on a specific topics. This is the description of the one I attended. David Thomson proposes: forget that movies may be art or show business. They are an experiment with our sense of reality. Thus, it is in entering into a picture and emerging from it that the culture shock is most apparent and instructive. So he will talk about how movies begin and how they end by drawing upon Citizen Kane and Psycho. A master class in our culture of the dark—lovely and menacing. David Thomson was introduced as a foremost movie critic. An internet search says: David Thomson is a British film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books.

Thomson was fantastic, I was spellbound by what he said about the beginnings and endings of films with film clips of both Citizen Kane and Psycho. He spoke a little fast and there was so much content that I couldn't absorb and remember it all. I should have recorded the whole thing. I only recorded the end of his last lecture on the ending of Psycho. Appropriate for my last 'film' of the festival.

I'll come back to this post later hopefully. I have to dig deep to remember most of it. You had to be there.

Two beginning shots of Citizen Kane.

Two of the last frames of Citizen Kane.

Two begininning frames of Psycho.

The last frames of Psycho