Gavelwrench Fishfire | A Blog

Note from Julia: My sister Jessica ¹ has finally succumbed to my begging and will be contributing occasionally to Gavelwrench. Her knowledge of obscure movies verging on encyclopedic, she will mostly discuss film and entertainment, with a heavy emphasis on the imagination. Jess is one of the few adults who still has one.

Julia’s sister Jessica reporting here, from the last melting days of July. I’m not sure what my speciality will be, but I love movies so let’s start with that.

As a supreme procrastinator, I wanted my first post to be about director Jean Cocteau and for it to fall on his birthday, which passed on July 5. La Belle et La Bete was one of those films for us growing up. One that you couldn’t quite put into words, but you knew you were a different person after watching it. The grainy videotape checked out from the library adding to the dreamlike visuals and pacing, not needing the subtitles and getting gloriously lost in all the dark hallways of the Beast’s castle where the statues watched you out of the corner of their eyes. It seemed almost an odd continuation of the games we’d play in the backyard, and the air castles we’d build between the trees, warning each other of the dark creatures that lurked in the woods.

Both of us are at a crossroads now, and it’s funny how you don’t go home again exactly, but you do return to the wellspring of your imagination. We both love movies and art and neither of us are working in that field. That has to change. To tell or read or make up a story is to lay claim to a power no one can take from you. Cocteau understood that, even going so far as to ask his audience to grant him a little childlike acceptance in the opening to his masterpiece.

I don’t like the cynical, hardened shell of most film critiques today. Either they’re pining for a golden age that like most golden ages never actually existed, or feeling nostalgic for a movie that was terrible and hasn’t been too degraded by an admittedly unnecessary remake. So in writing about films I’m going to stick with what I like: films more people should know about, or current actors and films who make it all worthwhile.