I Was Lonesome
Note: This is the hundred-and-fiftieth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fifth favorite 1928 film, LONESOME, directed by Paul Fejos.
I was watching a lot of movies just over a year ago. In fact, by the time I had watched LONESOME on November 12, 2018, I was nearly three weeks out from the end of my five-year relationship. And the film hit me hard, not gonna lie. Hungarian Renaissance Man Paul Fejos tapped into the American (then-modern/big city) sensibility of loneliness and yearning. In fact, with his own film and life (which started in the medical world, segued into European film production, washed up onto America’s shores and independent filmmaking, slipped into the studio system, fled back to the European cinematic world, and ultimately settled in anthropology and perhaps greater recognition in that sphere), I’ve been reassured that most things don’t last. And with them, I’ve been reassured specifically that most bad things don’t last as well.
This essay is not about the mechanics of LONESOME, which I should briefly mention is a wonderful, concise, visually brilliant little bit of filmmaking, a product of immaculate conception. Fejos was untainted by studio system conventions. That led to his demise within it, and the brief talkie sequences forced upon him by the changes happening in 1928. By then, an era was ending. In America, at least, it was the last full year of the silent period for film. And now, it represents the (hopefully quite temporary) hiatus for this series of essays, a series I’ve been almost entirely consistent with week after week since January 2017, just about three years ago.
These essays have come with me for the most up-and-down three years of my life. They were a constant creative outlet through the failure of one career and the beginning of another “temporary” one that has evolved into an even more confusing purgatory. They were a necessary fixation in the lead up to a much more terrifying creative outlet, the moments leading up to me stepping on a stage to tell jokes. They were briefly forgotten in the wake of that aforementioned break up, one with a lot of moving parts. They were revived in the bizarre process of dating and upping my stand up game, and once again forgotten in the midst of hitting an all-time low. They were on the up-and-up with the identification of another desired, simultaneous career in teaching film. And they now are a wonderful part of my wide-open, happy life with someone I never thought I’d find, a partner that erased the loneliness of last winter and the summer of 2019 and does so much more. LONESOME brought me to tears once again, a year later from the last time, but they were happy tears. I’m no longer lonesome.
I’ll be back with more musings about old-ass movies in short order. I just gotta figure out the weird world of the early talkies.
