Every Wednesday at 5 p.m., Movie Club meets in the Old Gym. Today, they’re discussing the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Nightcrawler, which ironically—considering my status as a reporter for this publication—is a film about a corrupt freelance journalist. This week, the club meeting is being led by one of the members, who has set up her computer, preparing to give a presentation on the movie’s themes and characters.
Movie Club is fairly democratic, with a member picking a new film to watch every week, and then the following meeting they lead a discussion on their thoughts on the film, assessing characters and general reactions. As I sit down at my usual spot, all the familiar faces file into the classroom, and friendly chatter begins to fill the room.
We wait for the club supervisor—Dr. Faith Kurtyka—to show up and officially start off the meeting. Dr. Kurtyka, an associate professor in the English department who teaches literature and composition courses, has always had a deep appreciation for the art form.
“I’m a big cinephile, and I listen to a lot of podcasts about movies, so I wanted to create a similar environment for students to discuss movies,” said Dr. Kurtyka. “I feel like I’m teaching students how to have well informed opinions, how to have taste, how to have discourse with someone else… I’m teaching them how to have an opinion, which I think is really important in our society.”
Kurtyka’s love for films started all the way back in her adolescence.
“I never got to go to like, smart kid school, so everything I learned [was] from movies, and I was a teenager in the late 90s, which was an excellent time for film. So, I always felt like movies challenged me intellectually and made me reflect in ways that I never felt like school did,” she shared.
“My whole life has been oriented towards trying to get someone to watch a movie with me. …My friend and I got these two guys to go to prom with us by taking them to see The Matrix in 1999. And that’s like, the story of my entire life,” said Kurtyka. “Like who I dated, who I was friends with, what I was doing on the weekend, always revolved around, ‘how can I somehow get to watch a movie?’”
However, Kurtyka doesn’t want Movie Club to be an elitist club of film critique and analysis. She seems dedicated to making film criticism and discussion an accessible, fun activity.
“When students had talked to me before about wanting to start a movie club, I wanted to capture the kind of non-academic nature of movies, that I don’t want to analyze them like English majors. I want to talk about, ‘how do they make you feel?’” she said.
This emphasis on emotions and allowing yourself feel things brings me back to something she said at a previous meeting that was dedicated to “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” where the group was talking about the main villain, Death, a menacing wolf wielding two sickles. She shared a story about how her children didn’t like the film because it was too scary, which confused her because that was the point! Feeling things because of the film was the point; it means that the movie did its job.
“Sometimes that means we just talk about whoever is hot in the movie, but that’s okay, because it’s kind of like how a movie is trying to make you feel something. I want to move away from this brainy, bloodless analysis and towards this really emotional connection to the movies, which I think is way more interesting to talk about,” exclaimed Kurtyka.
Not only is Movie Club a stand against elitism, but it’s also a statement of her place as a woman in the cinephile space.
“Cinephiles are like, a very male dominated area, so I always felt like I was the outsider and I always felt like movies were made for men and movies were talked about by men, so I wanted to push back on that as being like, I can talk about these movies too, and I can watch these movies too…,” she said.
Kurtyka has had her own share of encounters with film-bros, some even being her students.
“I used to have movie posters up in my office, but then these male students would come in and mansplain the movies to me, so I took all the posters down,” she explained. “Because I like boy movies. I like movies that are typically for men, but I just reclaim them for me, because like, good movies are for everybody, they’re not just for men.”
However, despite knowing the types of movies she likes, sometimes the student’s recommendations catch her by surprise.
“We watched a movie last year called The Straight Story, which is a G-rated movie about a farmer to drives a tractor from… Iowa to Wisconsin. I like gritty movies, I like dark movies, I like violent movies. This movie is so chill, and it’s just this old guy on his tractor, and I loved it. And I would have never watched it had it not been for Movie Club,” she shared.
“It just felt to me like this sort of masterstroke of artistry by this director David Lynch, who was like, a movie doesn’t need to be gross and violent and scary. It can just be a guy on a tractor and just like totally blow you away. And so, it’s movies like that, that I would have never watched had the students not exposed me to them.”
Perhaps if you join Movie Club, you too can stumble on a film masterstroke by accident.