Film Takes A (Roman) Holiday

Or the Story of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Watching Movies

It is 90 degrees outside and St. Peter’s Square is filled with thousands of pilgrims waiting to see Pope Leo XIV. Pentecost weekend is the Jubilee of Movements as part of the general Jubilee year. I am sweating profusely, having been seated outside in the heat for hours waiting. The Pope’s homily was in Italian and my grip on the language only extends to ordering at restaurants and asking for directions so I understood very little. In it, as I later read translated, he said that “the Holy Spirit comes to challenge us, to make us confront the possibility that our lives are shriveling up, trapped in the vortex of individualism”. I realized then and now that this has described many struggles in my life, but mostly especially my relationship with film.

During the pandemic, I spent most of my time watching movies. In retrospect, I wish I spent more time reading the classics or lifting or any number of more materially productive activities. Nevertheless, I gave myself a full education in film history from Edison and Méliès to Godard and experimental film to the streaming age. This was wonderful, but like it was many others, the pandemic was a time of great isolation and loneliness.

This era would finally end for me in the Fall of 2022 when I spent a semester abroad in Rome. There I would meet my wife and embark on a series of adventures across the continent. Movies were a big part of why we started dating. One of our first conversations was on the topic where she thrilled me by saying her favorite directors were Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino.