by Grace McEvoy

Many years ago I became interested in film as an intellectual pursuit. It grew to be a passion that my friends came to associate with me. I was a resource of knowledge and even studied film in college, although my degree is one well-rounded in media arts and humanities. My passion began in the late 1970s. Cable television was just beginning to catch on and many people got a free trial period of HBO. For many of us the trial period just went on and on and we never paid for cable. Those were good years to get free HBO. They had a good mix of films and showed many wonderful foreign films I would not otherwise have had an opportunity to see. So I got to spend my mid-high school years watching films by Lina Wertmuller, Federico Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman, as well as a number of odd and wonderful short films and good domestic films.

My understanding and appreciation of film was expanded by a short-lived show on public television called The Cinematic Eye with host Benjamin Dunlap. He would introduce the film, show it, and then dissect, critique and adore it. It was a lot of information in a short time and I ate it up. "Bernie" Dunlap later became my film history professor and told us that The Cinematic Eye had been described as being like watching a train fly by. Bernie was a fast-paced guy, but that was also my pace at the time. He once did a cartwheel and a hand-spring in class to demonstrate some point, but mostly to show off. I shared his enthusiasm for the cinema. For a period of time I was very interested in French film and was thrilled to see Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, one of the most beautiful films I had seen.

A victim of Ronald Reagan's education funding cuts, I found myself in Athens, Georgia, in 1981 or so with a useless student ID that ended up being my ticket to free films in the university library collection and at the union. That is when I saw Fellini's I Clowns and the film that made me want to make movies, Werner Hertzog's Stroszek.

I lived in a small wooden shotgun house with no electricity or furniture and saw at least one movie a day, sometimes three. This was not an escape, it was research, passion and adoration. Goons from Georgia Power with dark glasses in a big white car kept coming by to tell me that all I had to do was go to the power company and give them my $60 deposit and they would turn on my electricity. Some people have no understanding of poverty at all. By some happy accident/mistake on their part, I had gotten a month of free power and they were there to collect. Having no record of me as a customer there was little they could do except to continue "visiting" me every week or so. My part-time jobs didn't pay enough, it was cold, I became very ill, the goons were beginning to scare me, I ended up in my car, I had to get out of there but I am grateful for the period of intense film study courtesy of the University of Georgia, which I never attended.

Time passed and I managed to finish college and stay involved in film the whole time. I studied film, I made films, I brought filmmakers to speak at my university and eventually ended up in Austin hoping to continue pursuing my interest in film. There were enough ways to do that, but something happened during the first half of the last decade that I didn't expect. It was sly and I couldn't identify it for a long time, but my passion had turned into an obsession. Films were something I went to because I felt as if I had to. Missing an important (to me) movie could be a minor crisis. Making certain that I saw all the films I wanted to see became a burden. I was no longer enjoying them. Instead of having a cerebral or a pleasant experience -- or even any fun -- most of the time movie going made me anxious. Frankly, I had become passive and impatient. Like an addict I kept going back hoping for that good experience I used to have but instead it was making me depressed. What was going on? Was I just getting older? Had I seen too much film? Maybe I should have paced myself. Was it sensory overload like when you go to an enormous museum and after a couple of hours you can walk past a masterpiece you have admired in books all of your life and not really give a damn because you are just worn out? One theory of mine is that I had a premature mid-life crisis.

Eventually I had to simply stop going to see films and stop reading about them. I had already stopped making photographs because of burn out. For a while I made ceramics and the tactile, immediate experience was just what I wanted. I also made extravagant, fabulous food, but I kept my distance from film for a long time.

So here comes SXSW again and with it the opportunity to see many fine films, I am sure. I have been avoiding that for some time, but recently I rented a film that made me think again. A friend recommended that I see Wim Wenders' The End of Violence, and something wonderful happened while I was watching it. I began to remember why I like film, Wim Wenders in particular. Watching the film was a happy, engaging experience. At times I found myself thinking yes, yes: that was good. Even the leaf blowers have significance (they really do). The next day I was feeling very pleased by my rediscovery of Wim Wenders and all of his clever choices. Trying some more films is the next logical step. Maybe my film aversion period has passed. Possibly attending some of the SXSW screenings has even occurred to me. I may do that. I may not, but I am feeling ever so much better about movies. I am also an upstanding citizen these days with an income and electricity. I pay for my movies, and if I had cable, I would pay for that as well.