An Aim Not Devoid Of Merit
At the beginning of the the 2017 documentary about his career Steven Spielberg recounts the story of being sixteen years old and seeing Lawrence of Arabia. The experience made him want to quit his dream of being a film director. David Lean’s film had set the bar too high.
Spielberg goes on to explain the transformation that T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) goes through over the course of the epic film. He explains that though Lawrence of Arabia is rightfully lauded as one of the greatest film epics ever staged, the heart of the story is all about one question: “who am I?”. Spielberg saw the film again each week for over a month. He was a young man obsessed and made the decision that even though the scope and scale of Lawrence of Arabia was something that terrified him he had to keep working in the medium of film. It simply meant too much to him.
Many months ago my best friend and I set forth on a quest to study the work of Steven Spielberg. This project took the form of a large number of video essays where we examine Spielberg’s work as a filmmaker and why so many of his films stand the test of time.
We’ve been releasing an episode a week for the last several weeks and I thought now would be a good time to start sharing them on this platform in the off chance that any readers would be interested in taking a look at any of our episodes. Enjoy!
