Umbugbene wrote: ↑Mon Apr 27, 2020 4:06 pm
On a side note, I'd be curious what everyone's favorite checklists are... probably worth a separate thread.
This forum has some great, esoteric lists of its own, and we all pretty much agreed IMDB has a rubbish list that was nevertheless a stepping stone for many, so I second Daniel's query about favourite checklists.
I *love* lists. (Cinephilia and lists seem to go together.)
One big cinephilic stepping-stone for me was Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1000 Essential Films, and a number of other smaller lists of his. Not trying to complete it, but it certainly means something to me if the film is on that list.
I joined iCheckMovies right around its start, and it was a big help in discovering lists. That's how I found TSPDT, which I loved and was devoted to exploring. I now care a bit less about its main list as its (by definition) the same-old-canonical-hits.
These days, I tend to like lists to have specificity, not merely the greatest films of all time but the greatest X of all time. TSPDT's 250 Noirs, TSZDT for Horror, & Silent Era's Top 300 silent films spring to mind. The polling here generates lots of fun specific lists, as do Letterboxd users. One example on Letterboxd is Scott Kelly. He has lists that rank all the movies he's seen for a given year, but then he also does top tens per year more specifically (1956: Westerns Top 10; 1956: Japan Top 10; etc.) and I enjoy finding recommendations on those. (Working on making specific recommendation lists of my own these days, which I'll make public on Letterboxd once I'm satisfied with 'em)
Not sure how others feel about this, but I rarely have the desire to see every movie on a given list, I tend more toward collating films I want to see from various lists into my own watch list. One upside is that I get to constantly tinker with my own list, which I derive eccentric pleasure from. One downside is that these days I don't often force myself to watch a movie outside my wheelhouse, which would happen more when I was putting more priority on what was or was not on an iCM list.
Back in 1990 I started out by devouring all the "essential films" in a book called An Incomplete Education. Later I knocked off the Academy Award Best Pictures and most of the Sight & Sound surveys, and now I track my progress on a few dozen lists including the SCFZ country polls, TSPDT, Palme d'Or winners, Kinema Junpo, Filmfare, and a few others.
Shortly before joining SCFZ in 2015 I was briefly infatuated with this long list on Mubi, which I guess a few of you had a hand in?
I'm always looking out for "fertile" lists that might lead me to new favorites (which are getting awfully hard to find these days). I'll adopt a list if it overlaps my taste much and has a lot of promising obscurities. I periodically check a few "Favorite Movies" lists that meet these criteria, like the ones by Brian D, Brotherdeacon, Flip, John Ryan, Kanafani, Rischka, and Karl's Eastern Europe and Japanese lists.
I do a lot of that too, often trying to see everything available by a director in one block. This week for example I watched five in a row by Zoltán Fábri.
Agree basically with everything in Evelyn's post, even down to JRose and TSPDT being my gateway lists, which lead me to discovering iCM.
I love lists more than I could possibly articulate.
iCM and Letterboxd lists are great resources, both for discovering films, and the aesthetics of their site designs which make completing lists/filmographies so enjoyable. I have a bunch of Letterboxd lists that I keep private until I'm ready to make them public, but they center around filmographies and seasons.
Cuz I'm old, lists were never much of a thing for me when I first started getting into movies because there wasn't a huge amount of options available in what you could watch and not many list books or whatnot were made. You were limited by what was being programmed at theaters or on TV, so you picked from what you had, which was fairly random. There was some attempts made at showing "good" movies, but it was as much what the programmers could get as any plan, which meant it was an odd hodgepodge of stuff, mostly in English, but with the occasional "foreign" film showing up on Public Television or dubbed on regular TV and whatever the arthouse theater chose to show.
I "researched" movies by reading Movies on TV, which provided short plot synopses for most old movies that could be shown somewhere and would get John Willis' Screen World Annual, which listed all the movies released during the given year of the book's release with some stills added, most of which weren't readily viewable outside maybe major cities. I'd also read whatever books of film history the library or book stores had, mostly on Hollywood, and movie magazines like Film Comment and collected reviews of critics like Kael, Sarris, and Simon. Later things like Danny Peary's Cult Movie book and The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film came out along with more and more books on broad selections of movies to match the increasing availability of choosing that came with cable TV and VHS popularity.
As such lists don't really do anything for me. I'll read some of the books, like Rosenbaum's, that talk about the films, but I never really spend any time trying to follow their prescriptions as that feels confining and less interesting than more haphazard browsing of titles. Undoubtedly I'm missing out on seeing some good movies, but as I'm not on any of the KG like sites and don't like asking others to either get movies for me or to choose movies I "should" see too much, since that's an unbalanced way to go, I still mostly just watch what I do by whim and availability based on whatever subject sparks an interest of the moment, theme, actor, era, director, poster/packaging or whatever. else strikes my fancy. I'm stubborn like that I guess, to absolutely no one's surprise.
^ in some (maybe obvious and universal) ways, that's a much nicer way of doing it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the time I was most into cinema was when I only had some 20-40 DVDs - and would watch them repeatedly, any time of the day, without worrying about what I was watching or about being in the perfect viewing conditions - as well as TCM, and whatever might be showing once a day on CBC or such. And then I would find something I desperately wanted to get on DVD, and pore over it when it arrived, and absorb every inch of the DVD cover and case and booklet and on-screen menu - not to mention the movie itself.
Now I have KG and Asiatorrents and 99.9% of the movies in the world available, any time - and there are just too many things to watch, and I don't really care. Except for when someone recommends, or forces me to watch, something, and then I really focus on it and I like cinema again. Man, my kingdom for some patronisation here...
I also grew up without much interest in lists or particular lists as guidelines. If anything, I went by what I read in books on film history.
I love listing and ordering stuff and such, so any list is automatically interesting to me for being a list. But there are no lists that influenced me or which I found important or such.
I did my film watching randomly, choosing what was available, going to the cinematheque, taping stuff with subs from TV, renting classics from specialized videotheques, etc. and especially reading a lot of film magazines and hundreds of books on film. As a teen I once even read a huge 1000+ pages tome about the history of cinema that went year by year with descriptions of thousands of films over the course of a few months from beginning to end at the local library. So I've read about tens of thousand of films as a teen and in my early 20s, most of which I have yet to see. That's probably why I'm not really interested in recommendations or such, cause I have thousands of films I want to see stacked in my memory and it mostly also helps hearing from close friends who have similar tastes like me on stuff I haven't read about.
As for favorite lists, my favorite lists are those I make myself. Currently usually on letterboxd.
Last edited by wba on Tue Apr 28, 2020 8:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
in some (maybe obvious and universal) ways, that's a much nicer way of doing it
It really depends on what you develop an interest in, I mean we all have limited time to watch movies, or do anything else for that matter, so what it is you are trying to "get" from films suggests better and worse ways of proceeding. I'm more interested than most, from what I can judge, in general aesthetics or appreciation and somewhat less in just trying to see the "greatest" films as might be thought of by hardcore connoisseurs who are more interested in seeking out the boundaries of cinema, the movies that might appeal to fewer but be more rewarding to those few for that appeal. It's not that I'm uninterested in those films, but watching the way I do makes finding them less likely in some ways for relying more on chance than planning.
Whether it's because of how I started watching led to how my interests were shaped or whether the interests shaped how I choose what to watch, I find trying to understand what it is in movies any given audience is appreciating and/or what that suggests about both movies and those watching them rather than searching for masterpieces, hidden or otherwise, by honing into narrower bands of film history and their more limited but intense appeal. That's part of why I stand up for 21st century movies and get worked up about how we talk about the changes to movies, genre, reception and all the rest over time I guess.
There are limitations to every list and the idea of a canon to explore on the whole, but I enjoy working my way through some lists (though not religiously as I have some fixed likes/dislikes I'm not too bothered about challenging) because part of what I like about cinephilia (or any other art fandom, as I'm also a keen reader/listener/etc.) is the opportunity to discuss and engage with good writing, and that's just more plentiful for recent stuff, as I have friends who like watching new movies but aren't bothered about old ones, and more plentiful for the canon, both because there's other people like me engaging with these lists and because the lists themselves are informed by what people are talking and writing about.
It's fun watching some 70s movie with 300 views on IMDB but the opportunity to engage with it once I'm done is much more limited, unless I really took the time and wrote it up and tried to get other people to watch it on here or elsewhere. Going for the canon is the path of least resistance but also gives me the opportunity to be both passive and informed, as I enjoy reading what people write about movies but don't like reading about stuff I haven't seen myself as much.
liquidnature wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2020 1:44 am
iCM and Letterboxd lists are great resources, both for discovering films, and the aesthetics of their site designs which make completing lists/filmographies so enjoyable.
Definitely feel the same. And I didn't know about this western list, but it looks great! Love exploring westerns these days for reasons unknown to me, so I may set a goal to complete this (post-70s westerns aside)
some of my favourite lists are the country/region lists we made from polls here at scfz. those lists have a good mix of canon films and unseen gems. the only other lists i really ever look at, besides scfz ones, are the 250 quintessential noirs list from tspdt (which i think they're replacing with a longer list, which seems like a bad idea to me) and the two long lists of 300+ silent era films on icheckmovies, among their official lists (don't remember their names offhand).
the 250 noirs list is the only one i really have any interest in 'completing', just because i'm close (220/250) and am interested to see the remaining films anyway.
even with 650+ films on that icm western list, it's still missing some of my favourite westerns.
Love exploring westerns these days for reasons unknown to me, so I may set a goal to complete this (post-70s westerns aside)
