This week was a very engaging one for me, and I am sure for many of my peers. Despite being thrown into this new universe of online learning and film observation, we’re still studying cult cinema, and interacting with our classmates.

This week’s screening (From the comfort of my room) was “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.” This film got a lot of praise from our professor prior to the screening, while we were still at AU 😥 . And I can say without a doubt, it lived up to it. One of the craziest things I noticed during this film, was the MASSIVE amounts of cuts. As talked about in the podcast, “The longest single shot seemed to be like 8 seconds.” At first glance of this technique, I thought it was a great way to edit this film, and I felt it made things even more chaotic.

The reading I presented this week was called “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; Grandma What big Fangs You Have.” I found this reading to clear a lot of aspects of the film up for me. It helped guide me through the masterful “screen play gone movie.” My reading gave me the insight that Jires does these frequent cuts in order to create the chaos that I was feeling. He does not want any member of his audience to be able to grasp onto a singular plot line, or even be able to distinguish from real-life and folklore.

 If I am being totally honest, I could not distinguish either dimensions of location or time while watching Valerie, and I feel that this experience added to the film’s beauty. Not only was each scene and cut masterfully executed, beautiful, and accompanied by an incredible score, but I found myself lost in every conceivable way, and I LOVED that feeling.

I was beyond impressed by all three of our presenters this week. Each one of them was extremely confident in their film and proved Cult status very well. Buffalo 66 is a movie that I have not seen, but the presentation has led me want to watch it. As for scream, even though its apparently a funny horror movie, I will not be watching it, unless I have to, because horror only works for me in a well-lit room, with plenty of people around, and no cruel jokes pertaining to the film after the completion of the movie. Blade runner 2049, is a movie that I can really get behind because I have seen the first one in the series due to its availability on Netflix. I honestly cannot think of why I haven’t seen it yet, but now it is added to my list of must-sees.

Overall, this online learning has been awful for most of my classes. However, for some reason my outlook for this class has not changed. I think that it has a lot to do with the energy that is somehow still thriving, even though we are all hundreds of miles away from each other. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, you guys and gals are awesome.