Gail Desler, who I met in person at the CUE conference, tagged me to participate in the Passion Meme which asks you to post a picture and explain how it relates to your educational passion.

There are several rules but I’m not good at following the directions to these things. Here’s my take on it.

I think it was just a matter of chance that I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” when I was in the second grade. There it was, a film of passion. Jimmy Stewart spends the first half of the movie searching after a dead woman and the second half of the film obsessed with bringing that dead woman back to life. The unusual structure makes it so that at first, the characters keep a secret from the audience and then the film entrusts you with a secret in the film’s final third. In this frame from the movie, Jimmy Stewart tracks Kim Novak through the streets of San Francisco.

I’ve seen it twenty times or so and the film changed my life. Seeing “Star Wars” was certainly cool but “Vertigo”amazed me because I didn’t know that movies could do that…be spooky and mysterious and involve you so masterfully in the storytelling. The movie also played into my curiosity about my father who had died when I was one year old. The movie, whose original title was a French translation of “Among the Dead” reached out to the other side and spoke of death at the same time that it connected life with impossible longing.

I attribute the film more than any other event with my desire to become a filmmaker. That intensity and longing in my feelings for the film as well as the events in the actual film influenced my writing of books and movies throughout high school and beyond.

Today I can see the influence of Vertigo even in some of my film work even with children…the inevitable parting of the city mouse and the country mouse, the girl whose head falls off in Tales from the Yard, and the mysterious woman who disappears at the end of Camouflage Jones are each examples which touch upon Vertigo’s themes.

My passion is making movies and I am sure some of my students take on that passion as well through our work in class. However, I don’t think my job is to make students passionate about something particular but simply to make them passionate. I worry about the exposure of some of my students to some of the things that we take for granted. Sometimes even in their second grade eyes I see apathy. I want for them to care about something. To have some dream that that they want to work and to know what it is to be driven to accomplish that dream.

I knew that the odds against becoming a professional filmmaker were steep. I believed through my early twenties that I could make it as a filmmaker as long as I kept that feeling of need in the pit of my stomach. I kept myself unsatisfied and kept working toward the dream.

One day I realized that I didn’t have to wait for an end goal to be happy that I could be happy right then. Around the same time I took over a kindergarten class as a long term substitute and found purpose for the first time. Guiding them and encouraging them I knew I was making a difference. I saw my influence. And slowly new dreams replaced and merged with old ones.

Vertigo represents my dreams, old and new.

(For Vertigo fans or those who love San Francisco, see Vertigo Then and Now Site).