Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean)

What a beautiful film, David Lean's use of extreme wide shots among a vast desert landscape really gives a sense of scale and depth. My favorite scene has to be when Lawrence comes back with a rebel presumed dead, the way the music swells with the main theme and the buildup with tracking the three characters as they all hang on Lawrence's retrieval makes it feel so satisfying when they all reunite with each other. That along with of course the aforementioned extreme wide shots makes that scene so memorable in my head, I remember seeing it too in the Visions of Light documentary and it really awed me to how cinema can achieve such strong compositions and images that can stick in your head for years. That's the kind of film I want to make someday, I think watching this on the big screen really made me realize just how much respect you need to have for films and the theater experience if you want to create something that can awe an audience.

"What do you love so much about the desert?"

"It's clean."

Lawrence as a character is so intriguing to follow. As we witness his downfall we start to realize more and more of his lack of respect for the Arab people despite loving them. Lawrence sees them more as a novelty for his own validation, especially when he starts to gain more and more respect from them for his courageous acts. However, this all backfires when he gets too in over his head and ends up risking more and more lives to keep up the messiah-like image he creates for himself. This is seen most evidently when he executes fellow Arabs in the vain of mercy and keeping the peace. He convinces himself that it needs to be done and while his guilt may be fully genuine, deep down he sees them as nothing more than objects to worship him and blindly follow him. This fully escalates during their takeover of Damascus when he leads his whole army into killing a group of traveling Turks, aimlessly killing and sacrificing his own men because he feels like that's what's expected of him. It's that scene which really tells the audience that he truly doesn't care about his Arab comrades and cares more about fulfilling the idea of him being this brave leader who takes big risks for high reward when in actuality there is no reward. All of these feelings about Lawrence the audience have are articulated through Sharif as he follows Lawrence through all of his adventures and becomes more disillusioned with Lawrence's actual capabilities. We feel his frustration too as he continues to try to guide Lawrence into being more sensible and accepting his mortality yet it fails in the end because Lawrence ultimately lacks respect for Arabia and victimizes himself to justify his recklessness.