Welcome!

HI and welcome to my wonderful film blog.  I know many of my fellow classmates from various other film courses, but if this is your first time getting to know me, I want to introduce myself.  I’m Ashley and I’m a senior English/Lit major and Film and Media Studies minor.  A few things about moi: my favorite film is Night of the Living Dead ('68), I love Clint Eastwood, and I can recite every line of the Eagles' "Hotel California".  Seminar in Cinema Studies is actually my last film course as an undergraduate, so it’s a little bitter sweet.  I entered college as an English major only, but after taking a film genre course with Dr. Lucia in the fall of 2010, I fell in love with the program. 

Enough about me!  I wanted to share some thoughts on The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).  It’s the film I have chosen to adopt for the film symposium this year, and I viewed it again for the second time this weekend and fell in love with it.  I never thought I would desire subtitles for a film in English, but these England accents are ridiculous.  To set the scene, the film centers around Colin Smith, a teenager who has been sent to a reform school/detention camp after he robs a bakery.  The school prides itself on its unity, and all of the boys wear the same clothes, shower together, work together, and eat together.  There is an awfully creepy scene where an auditorium full of boys sing a hymn in unison.  Smith becomes singled out by the headmaster after he learns the boy is an exceptional runner.  Smith then spends the movie training for a competition against another school for boys which takes place at the end of the film.

Between Smith’s workouts we get flashbacks of his life.  We learn that he comes from a poor, working class family, his father has just died, and that there is some definite tension Smith and his mother, who has moved on quickly after her husband's death.  I found there to be many themes that run through this film.  There is definitely tension between lower and upper class, and even region.  This is evident in the way Smith treats money, and the way his mother spends all of it after her husband dies.  There is also tension between the idea of conformity and authority.  Smith appears to resent both, but finds himself in between the two at many points in the film.  He conforms to the rules/ways of the reform school, but was obviously unable to do this in the outside world, because his repeated stealing and lying ultimately gets him in trouble.  Along with these themes, we also glimpse into the teenage life of Smith, who spends his time balancing between the 'typical' (finding a girlfriend) and 'atypical' (becoming a father figure).

I did a little bit of poking around on the internet to see what the UK was like during the sixties.  In ’62, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones were emerging.  The British New Wave occurred during the early years of the sixties, where filmmakers were producing films that were based around social realism.  There was an emphasis on the working class, location shooting, and London.  I see very obvious connections to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.  For starters, many scenes were filmed with a hand held camera, adding to that aspect of real life.  The film also centers on Smith, who is from a lower, working class background.  Many scenes take place on location, in worn down, tiny neighborhoods and streets.  There is some animosity toward Smith’s hometown and his desire to live in London, which could stem from the stress his family causes him.  Aesthetically, Loneliness differs from its Hollywood counterparts.  The handheld camera (which I’m a sucker for) gives it a more realistic, rough look, which is the complete opposite of Hollywood’s more polished films (think Splendor in the Grass).   You should check out The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which can be found here.