15 Movies - Festen, The Vanishing and Paris Is Burning

Here are the last three movies in my list of "15 Movies" from the Facebook meme I did a couple of months ago. I started this project of blogging about them in earnest, but clearly got distracted by other things like food! and cows! and stationary! So, let's finish things off.

13. The Celebration (Festen)

I think that "The Celebration" was one of the first Danish movies I watched of my own accord. I remember being at my Auntie Linda's house as a pre-teen while my Mom and my aunts watched "Babette's Feast" and thinking it was the most boring, slow-moving movie of all-time. That's my earliest memory of seeing a Danish movie, but I wasn't really watching it as much as I was hoping that they would stop watching it so I could watch TV. My Mom is Danish, so I'm half-Danish (or 51% Danish we like to joke). When I was a teenager it became especially important to me to recognize that part of my family heritage. Maybe it's because Canada has a somewhat non-existent sense of national identity (usually identifying yourself as Canadian begins with, "Well, I'm not American"), but I really globbed on to my Danish roots. Being Danish (or half-Danish as it were) was more tangible to me than being Canadian (although, I'm happy to call myself Canadian, too). There were traditions and food and mischievous elves. So, when the Dogme 95 movement began I took it upon myself to learn about and watch Danish cinema as much as I could. "The Celebration" was my first exposure to Dogme 95 and new Danish cinema. Since then I've seen a number of Danish and Scandinavian movies some much better than others, naturally. What can I say, films from Northern Europe don't tend to be particularly cheerful, but they do make you think.

14. The Vanishing (Spoorloos)

This movie was remade in the US and starred Keifer Sutherland. I haven't seen that version, but I remember reading about it in entertainment magazines in the early 1990's. The version I saw, and that freaked me out, was the original Dutch movie. Sean bought the DVD and we watched it together and it really left an impression, I guess, because it made it onto this here list. It is creepy as all get out. The antagonist is smooth, unsuspecting and a complete psychopath. If you're claustrophobic you should not see this movie.

15. Paris is Burning

In my first semester of university back in 1998 I took a course called "Postmodern Literature" and it changed the way I thought forever. First, it introduced me to the concept of postmodernism, second it set the foundation for how I would approach my university experience from then on. We read and discussed Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut amongst other things. I can't remember exactly how I came up with the topic for my term paper, but I remember it having to do with subcultures and marginalized groups. I wanted to write about drag queens and the professor for the course was incredibly encouraging. He recommended that I watch "Paris Is Burning" before I began my research. I still lived in the suburbs at that point and the only video store that I could find that had a copy of the film was the Rogers Video on Davie Street in downtown Vancouver. I took the bus and Skytrain out there, signed up for a store membership and brought the video back to New Westminster.

I'm lucky. My parents have always been really open about all sorts of things with my sisters and I. They have always, as far as I can remember, had gay friends. It was a non-issue in my house. My Dad, as I've mentioned, is an artist so there were always eccentric and sometimes queer people in our lives. My Dad had (I say "had" because I took it when I moved out, ha!) a book called "As A Woman" full of Australian men in drag, which I used while researching my paper. And I watched "Paris Is Burning" and my life changed. While I had always been fairly involved in equality issues and had been volunteering at the local AIDS Walk for years at that point, I think seeing this movie elevated my commitment to the GLBTQ movement. It's an amazing documentary and it definitely heightened my appreciation and compassion for those living on the fringes of society and it made me want to make these people are a part of my world. I have it on DVD now and I watch it semi-regularly. You should take some time and watch it!

And thus concludes my list of 15 Movies. I hope that you enjoyed it. I'm glad that I managed to finish up these posts...finally.