Movies, Myths, and Archetypes

Movies really began for me in 1960 when I was a freshman in college, with Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Godard's Breathless, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. Movies had become literature. Then in 1972 friends in the biz brought me to a nighttime filming of the cruising scene for George Lucas's American Graffiti, and later I spent a day with Lucas hearing about a "sword and ray gun" movie he was working on. I made sure I was at the first showing of Star Wars in New York in 1977. By then I was attending lectures by the mythologist Joseph Campbell and had read his The Hero with a Thousand Faces. With La Dolce Vita, etc., I had come to appreciate movies as literature. Now I could also appreciate them as myth. John Lobell