The Act of Reading is Mark Blumberg's first
documentary feature. One can categorize it as what's considered a
"personal, or me documentaryâ€, as it tells the story of his Ahab-like
obsession of finally writing the book report on "Moby Dick" that, without doing
so in eleventh grade, caused him to fail his English class. Damn that wickedly,
wordy, white whale!
Show of hands from those of you reading this:
how many of you can honestly say you made it through the entire novel?Anyone?Buhler?Yeah, neither have I. But
we know the story, don't we? From the first line "Call me Ishmael" to
the drowning death of Ahab, we all know a bit about the story. T'was obsession
that did him in. A lesson, to be sure. Herman Melville's fanatical Ahab
predates J.M. Barrie's Captain Hook and his crocodile obsession by fifty-three
years. Yes, Barrie based his captain on Melville's.
The film opens, in of all places, Austin,
Texas with high school English teacher Vicki Hebert introducing the novel "Moby
Dick" to her class. Had we had an instructor with such passion for the material,
we too may have been "given membership in a kind of cohort, or club [in
which] one finds a, little disturbing, as well as exhilarating sense for many
readers that the book was written for them." says Samuel Otter - Professor
of English UC Berkeley.I had
instructors in both high school and college whose passion was palpable. Paul
Noonan and Father Robert Roth, S.J. would "act" what we were
studying\, Noonan with Shakespeare's Macbeth and Roth with Plato's Socrates
dialogues. That may be why I have a passion for those works as opposed to
Melville's novel with its rough sledding through mogul-filled vocabulary along
with its "theological meditations" (as voiced by Otter). Many of the
characters' names and attributes have biblical roots. Ishmael, Elijah, Rachel.
And the name Ahab (according to Wikipedia), "derives from the Hebrew ahavah
and aheb meaning "to love" or "beloved".
Blumberg's journey kicks off in New Jersey
and takes us many places. He meets with his former English teacher, Janet
Werner. He informs her that this film is going serve as his overdue book
report. He travels to Bedford, Massachusetts to take part in the annual
"Moby Dick Marathon" where he meets Peter Whittemore, the great-great-grandson
of Melville and we intrude on some of the aloud readings. Back in Austin,
Blumberg's wife, Alissa, meets Elizabeth Doss, yoga instructor, playwright and great-great-great-granddaughter
of Melville. She's written a play, "Poor Herman" and we see scenes
from it.
We're taken to the Arrowhead Farm in
Berkshire county, Massachusetts. It was Melville's home. We, along with
Blumberg and Whittemore, learn more about Melville's history, family and
'affair' with Nathaniel Hawthorne. To Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and the Mixed
Magic Theatre company where we meet Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, an actor/theatre
director who staged "Moby Dick- Then and Now" (we see excerpts) for
M.I.T.'s New Media Literacy Project. On to San Francisco where we meet Mark
Blumberg's older brother Kris, a nurse who tells Mark, who is attempting toturn him on to "Moby Dick", "I don't read. So I don't think."
Maryanne Wolf - Reading Expert, Stanford
University: "Most people believe that reading is something that the brain
has that unfolds just like language or vision. It is anything but true. Reading
is an unnatural act."Philosophy
Professor John Cleary: "How we find meaning is often constructed, not
received. The meaning that's found by the student is theirs, they have to
possess it and make it theirs...Being wise means that you're engaged
with the interpretation of wisdom."And there's an excerpt from Plato's Phaedrus and "the illusion of
knowledge." Wolf informs us of how it was Socrates who helped
"transition an oral-based culture to a literacy culture and how it relates
to us as we are transitioning from a literacy based culture to a digital one
with similar issues about memory and delusions of knowledge."
Back
to the marathon. Back to the experts. To the museum. To the Whalecave, Queequeg!It all sounds much harder to follow than it actually
is.
"The Act of Reading" seems, at times, almost
too ambitious. There is so much information here... Clinical experts expound on
the nature of learning, on Dyslexia, and how it's been with humanity for over
50,000 years, hoow our capacity for learning comes from reading. Somehow,
Blumberg manages to pull them together in this film.
As Vicki Hebert says: "Reading is more
intimate than any other media." And, as to why she teaches her students "Moby Dick":
"I want them to be happy with who they are. But I want them to be smart
about the world so they don't get eaten alive or horribly disappointed.†Why is
"Moby Dick" so important to that? This film attempts to answer that question.
"The Act of Reading" is much more intimate than
a viewer will expect, especially the final scene at the Blumberg Family home
when Mark's former teacher Janet Werner and her husband join the Blumbergs for
dinner and film critique.
The film is available to stream as on
iTunes or for rent on Amazon Prime.