Let’s back up a couple of days, and review the last sentence of this comment. The words are Alan Levine’s.

Yes, they do. I keep thinking about these small acts, the good mornings and the readys and the proceeds and the one I asked them to do just yesterday in my film class: CUT! We were beginning the lesson on editing, which means we were going to learn about the most common way of joining two shots together: the cut. Turns out this powerful editing method is also nearly impossible to see, until you train your eyes–what my film students this term are calling their “film eyes”–to see them. (Any symbolic meaning there is purely intentional, but blame the universe, not me.)

I think about these small acts in at least two ways: filling the tapestry, and establishing ritual.

“Filling the tapestry” comes from Alfred Hitchcock, who spoke of this concept in an interview with Francois Truffaut. Truffaut had asked Hitchcock about a bystander in a particular shot, a woman at the side of the frame who was eating an apple. No lines, and no other action. Just eating an apple.

F. Truffaut: [Y]our pictures are very elaborate throughout….

A. Hitchcock: They’re elaborate in an oblique way; yes, they are.

F.T.: They’re so elaborate that it’s difficult to believe that these things just happen to be in your films. If so, they must be credited to a powerful cinematic instinct. Here’s another instance of what I mean: When [in I Confess] Montgomery Clift leaves the courtroom, he is surrounded by a hostile crowd of people in a lynching mood. And just behind Clift, next to Otto Keller’s lovely wife, who is obviously upset, we see a … woman eating an apple, and looking on with an expression of malevolent curiosity.

A.H. That’s absolutely right; I especially worked that woman in there; I even showed her how to eat that apple.

F.T. Well, what I’m trying to bring out is that these elaborate details are generally overlooked by the public because all the attention is focused on the major characters in the scene. Therefore, you put them in for your own satisfaction and, of course, for the sake of enriching the film.
A.H. Well, we have to do those things; we fill the whole tapestry, and that’s why people often feel they have to see the picture several times to take in all of these details. Even if some of them appear to be a waste of effort, they strengthen a picture. That’s why, when these films are reissued several years later, they stand up so well; they’re never out of date.

These small acts are a way of filling the tapestry. And of course by filling the tapestry, students begin to see that this required course, this course that fit their schedule, this course that they parachuted into willy-nilly and never thought for a moment would be anything other than coursework and a grade … might well be a tapestry. A tapestry that they have helped to fill.

The other way I have learned to think about these small acts is that they are rituals. Motifs. Reminders. The rituals locate us in time and space, especially for those moments in which we are together there. (For a synchronous Zoom meeting, we are certainly together in time and space even if we are not in the same physical room.) The rituals also give us a strong set of shared experiences that are not tasks so much as they are acknowledgments and preparations. Like a nod of recognition, or a smile at a neighbor as you go out to check the mailbox, or the greeting I used to give the folks at the pizza place where I’d get my lunchtime slice in the before-time, these are rituals. Some are small, and some are mighty. Some rituals transcend being, some concentrate being, and some do both. Rituals are both intimate and utterly transpersonal.

The key, as I have learned from my friend Louis, is kavanah. That’s the Hebrew word for ritual that’s fully inhabited, fully meant, and thus fully meaningful. Kavanah is the energy coursing through our good mornings and our readys and our intro music and our farewell gifts.

Do the students realize all of these things? I don’t speak about such things directly, or even hint at them much. I’m sure some of them never notice. I’m also sure some of them do … and I know for sure that I do. And if I’m the only one feeling the kavanah on a particular day, it’s still what I yearn to feel, because I know it makes me a better teacher.

So I ask for kavanah, and I seek to fill the tapestry, and I want us to do that together. I ask for a good morning. I require an avatar. And lately, I’ve come to insist that anyone who blogs in my courses must have a tagline for their blog site. We’re nearly at midterm, and there are still some students who have the default tagline on their RamPage: “Just another Rampages.us site.” I bet I’ve asked my students five or six times to change those taglines to something else. I’ve emailed them with instructions. I’ve been stern but kind, like Maria in The Sound of Music.

But the kids are alright. (I can call them “kids” at my age, can’t I? With affection, never with condescension. I often envy them, after all.) Many of them have already caught on. Many of them have learned from each other’s examples. And there’s time, plenty of time, for everyone to fill the tapestry. I won’t forget.