Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard."　-Murakami Asahi-do -Haruki Murakami-

　　Continuation of the previous story about movies. (By the way, it would have been better to use "Continuation from the Previous Story" as the ongoing title for this column.)

I actually enrolled in the Film and Theater Department at Waseda University's Faculty of Literature and studied film. However, that doesn't mean I'm particularly knowledgeable about movies or that I understand them better than others. In fact, when I think about it, university education seems to lack much meaning. Nevertheless, what was good about being in Waseda's film department is that I hardly had to study. We had lectures like "Eisenstein's Montage Theory" that we were supposed to read in English, which required some preparation, but fundamentally, we didn't study much. This is because the students in the film department have the mindset of, "What's the point of studying theory? Can we really understand films?" So, what did we do instead? We would skip classes and go to the art house cinema in the morning to watch movies. Even though it was considered skipping class, for film students watching movies was a legitimate form of studying. There was no room for complaints. That's how, during my student days, I watched a lot of movies. I watched over two hundred films in a year. Back then, there were no magazines like "Pia," so it was quite a challenge just to find the movies we wanted to see or discover new cinemas. When I ran out of money to watch movies, I would go to the Theater Museum located at the main building of Waseda and read the screenplays from old movie magazines. Reading screenplays becomes incredibly fascinating once you get used to it. When it's a film you haven't seen, you can create your own movie in your mind based on the screenplay. Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," which I mentioned in the previous story, was one of those films for me. Even though it was the first time I saw the movie, it felt oddly nostalgic.