Personal Challenges, 2021

[---]

We had this pretty cool thread in 2019 https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=54

I don't think we had one last year

Anybody going to make a challenge for themselves? I will, and realistically will probably stop following through by March at the latest

[Silga]

I too love making those challenges and, sadly, rarely follow up on them for the entire year.

Some of the challenges for 2021:

1. Films from China. I've already made a list of films that I want to see. Also includes the surrounding regions.
2. Expand on the filmographies of directors I'd like to nominate for our Directors Poll in the future.
3. Watch films made in years that we still haven't done in our Year Polls. Not much left though. Will focus on 1988 and probably 2015 a little. Will continue to focus on the years we poll if we reset the entire thing and start over once we are done with the now remaining years.
4. Westerns. 2020 was a record year in terms of the number of western I've watched (20), but that's not enough and I want to spend more time in the wild west in 2021.
5. More Sci-Fi wouldn't hurt either. Already made a sweet little list too.
6. Complete some film franchises where I miss a film or two or more. Because the completist in me demands it.
7. Less re-watches, PLEASE! (insert Travis Bickle mirror scene).

You all will be witnesses that I can't follow these challenges. Shame me on that when applicable.

[greennui]

I've kinda given myself a challenge next month to mostly watch mainstream from the 80s/90s/00s. Lots of rom-coms and whatnot. We'll see how long I last...

[---]

Coming Up Curtis

Wherein SAD_SCROOGE gives himself, and promptly fails at, some challenges for 2021

Underexplored Classics Challenge
January: Senegal (watch 10)
February: Nigeria (watch 10)
March: China (watch 15)
April: Argentina (watch 10)
May: Brazil (watch 10)
June: Mexico (watch 10)
July: Egypt (watch 15)
August: Egypt (watch 15)
September: Turkey (watch 10)
October: Iran (watch 15)
November: Non-Russian USSR (watch 15)
December: Non-Russian USSR (watch 15)

South Asian Cinema Challenge (watch 5 each month)
January: Silent Movies (all regions) ✓✓✓
February: Pre-Partition Talkies (all regions)
March: Parallel Cinema/New Wave
April: Classic Bollywood
May: Golden Age of Bollywood
June: New Bollywood
July: Punjabi Cinema
August: Gujarati Cinema
September: South Indian (Tamil/Telugu) Cinema
October: Post-New Wave Bengali Cinema (including Bangladeshi films)
November: Pakistani (Urdu/Sindhi) Cinema
December: Sri Lankan/Nepalese Cinema

Director Blind Spots (an unscheduled, unorganized, casual attempt to expand my knowledge of some directors by whom I have seen fewer than 3 films)

• Helmut Käutner (seen 2)
• Yves Allégret (seen 2)
• Alain Robbe-Grillet (seen 1)
• Kô Nakahira (seen 1)
• Yasuzo Masumura (seen 0)
• Boris Barnet (seen 1)
• Gustav Machatý (seen 0)
• Raúl Ruiz (seen 0)
• Edward Yang (seen 1)
• Johnnie To (seen 2)
• Germaine Dulac (seen 0)
• Manoel de Oliveira (seen 0)
• João César Monteiro (seen 0)
• Dominik Graf (seen 0)
• Christian Petzold (seen 2)

Theme Months
January: snow_szn_2021
February: SCI-FIBRUARY
March: port.cities.coastal.towns
April: ♫ musicals ♫
May: MAY I JOIN? [sports movies]
June: westerns
July: westerns
August: SAMURAUGUST
September: spaghetti westerns
October: horror movies
November: NOIRVEMBER && NEO-NOIRVEMBER
December: snow_szn_2022

[Silga]

May: MAY I JOIN? [sports movies]

Sounds fun! I may partake!

[der kulterer]

I watched this year the following documentary...
ZANZIBAR (Jackie Raynal, 2005)
https://letterboxd.com/film/zanzibar-2005/

Thereafter, I made a little reading and tagged on Kinometer 21 films (besides the doc above) as "zanzibar films"...
https://www.kinometer.com/?tag=8910
I don't remember anymore if I copy-pasted a single list of such films or if I picked them one by one from various sources.
There are certainly some more films of this kind which I didn't spot yet.
Then, I hoped to watch those films (as many as possible) and get familiar with the phenomenon (about which I know near to nothing).
But so far I didn't watch a single film from this list.
So, I guess I can resolve to make such an investigation in 2021.
On January 1st 2021, I will start a thread called "Zanzibar Films" (here somewhere) and will keep tirelessly throughout the whole year uncovering all the Zanzibar film movement treasures (I hope those are mostly treasures and not knick-knacks).

[brian d]

the plan is to watch 52 movies from the philippines, but i'm not watching a whole lot of new stuff right now to start with, and i put some lav diaz films on my watchlist, so...

[MrCarmady]

https://letterboxd.com/mrcarmady/list/white-whales/

Made this list a while back, would be nice to make some ground, gonna aim for half. Though I'll probably realise I'm missing some major stuff and it'll keep growing...

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Mostly, I want to read, but I'm going to try to manage 20-ish movies a month. In 2020 I tried to do seasonal challenges (HK movies in January and February, westerns in the summer, etc.), but this year I decided I'd rather keep all my viewing themes open all year 'round and dart between them every month. My main planned challenge on that note is to watch at least 2 Japanese movies per month, 2 Hong Kong movies per month, and 2 Italian movies per month.

[St. Gloede]

I started a challenge last year to explore African cinema this year, it was really rewarding and will continue that in 2021.

Besides that, I will, unlike any other year (somehow) try to focus in on newer films from the festival circuit and similar and actually try to stay on top of new arthouse releases.

[kanafani]

7. Less re-watches, PLEASE!

For me it's more re-watches.

[St. Gloede]

Oh yes, same for me. A lot more rewatches.

I hit my all-time high this year I think - with 30-40 rewatches, and it has been utterly incredible. More of that please!

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I've got a lb list of one film from every country in the world (with a broader than usual definition of the word "country") and I've only seen films from about 30%. So I'd like to make quite a bit of headway to expanding my geographical reach.

[kanafani]

Oh yes, same for me. A lot more rewatches.

I hit my all-time high this year I think - with 30-40 rewatches, and it has been utterly incredible. More of that please!

Only 20 rewatches for me in 2020, but they were some of my favorite movies of the year. I want to double that number.

[flip]

over the last couple of years, i've watched a lot of

• 250 quintessential noirs (23 to go!)
• cinema of iran
• deanna durbin films (seen them all, thanks evelyn!)

i'll continue with the noirs and iranian films as i find new stuff to watch. i've also started making inroads into

• cinema of india
• cinema of africa
• cinema of czechia/slovakia/hungary

though from india and africa especially i've seen only the minutest fraction of what's likely worth seeing. i'll probably devote a month to at least one of the above at some point, but i don't intend to map anything out for the year, i'll just watch what i feel like

[thoxans]

while it's not necessarily something i want to do, i'll probs have to watch less movies in 2021. other than that, i need to start clearing stuff off my dvr, before it starts doing it for me

[St. Gloede]

• cinema of africa
• cinema of czechia/slovakia/hungary

Do let me know if you find anything exciting and unknown from either region. I love checking in on Czechoslovakian (seen little since they broke up though) and I always like returning for more - while Africa will be one of my clear focuses throughout the year.

(Best surprise African discovery was undoubtedly Med Hondo's West Indies - from Mauritania)

[St. Gloede]

Oh yes, same for me. A lot more rewatches.

I hit my all-time high this year I think - with 30-40 rewatches, and it has been utterly incredible. More of that please!

Only 20 rewatches for me in 2020, but they were some of my favorite movies of the year. I want to double that number.

20 is still more than my previous record. Had aimed for 20 or 25 last year, but got nowhere close. This year on the other hand I rewatched all of Bresson's filmography, which was one of the driving forces in getting me excited about rewatches - as well several Rohmers and Godards - both Stalker and Solyaris - and many other top favourites, including Marienbad, 2001 and Exterminating Angel.

Don't want to set any hard targets from 2021, but I'm hoping I'll at least be able to match this year, and possibly go further.

[brian d]

this is kinda funny to me cause i mostly rewatch, which is partly why i watch so few new films (to me) these days. my mother had about 25 movies she'd always watch so when i would come home from school as a kid one of them would always be on. i think that's where i get it from.

[---]

I always thought I barely rewatched, but in general it seems to be about 10% of my viewings. That's inflated by this year though (26%, about which half were shorts). I think historically I probably rewatch about 7% of the time, and don't favour features or shorts more than I do with first-time watches

[thoxans]

this is kinda funny to me cause i mostly rewatch

samesies! watching so much stuff i hadn't seen before is a fairly recent thing for me, like within just the past few years. but i've always been a big rewatcher, and it's usually the same movies over and over again, e.g., dave, doc hollywood, a few good men, maverick, my cousin vinny, etc. lots of '90s flicks, and most of them the kind that'd never make it near one of my poll lists

[flip]

Do let me know if you find anything exciting and unknown from either region.

likewise! i also haven't seen much recent czech cinema, i think petr zelenka is the only 1990s-onwards filmmaker from there that i know and like. and hopefully i'll see my first med hondo film this year.

[FLABREZU]

I was going to say something aboot pumping iron, but everyone here is just talking aboot movies...? What kind of a forum is this?

[Lencho of the Apes]

I rewatched a lot more when what was available was only broadcast TV and videocassettes. Last couple of years I feel like I average 3-4 rewatches a year. No question but that there are things I should be going back and revisiting...

[Holymanm]

i had 3 pure rewatches this year... but back when i was 15 and had seen 15 movies in my life, i would watch every movie i had on DVD 5 times. ahhh the limited choice days

[MrCarmady]

I was going to say something aboot pumping iron, but everyone here is just talking aboot movies...? What kind of a forum is this?

I was thinking of starting a fitness thread (obligatory disclaimer: everyone in worse shape than me is a stupid nerd, everyone in better shape is a dumb jock), so why the fuck not

[cinesmith]

While my viewing totals have been slowly dropping rather than rising over the last couple years. I still watched 365 films in 2020. 25 of these were films I'd seen before which is a first for me but then the lack of new releases has only offered up this time to fill the void with those other titles that were either recent items we may have missed or going into deeper dives.

I also commented on another LB members open vote/suggestions of films to watch, Initially, I made the error of assuming this was someone who hadn't seen that many films but when I looked at his profile I realized this person has clearly seen just as many films as I have (if not more, likely the later!) My suggestions were driven more by the idea of wanting to mix things up rather than just sticking to all films of a specific country or genre. I can only imagine that this would get laborious after a while so I only suggested that they pick some alternating options.

By the way, is it just me or does anyone else find the LB members section being sorted merely by popularity as a touch more than just lacking? There's no mechanism to sort by films viewed versus twitter followers. I take it there's a limit to how that website will ever see anything substantive for user interactions other than the comparisons to 'lists'

I guess I only wanted to bring up the point that while I can see the advantage and/or preference of desiring to fill in those 'Blind Spots' to which Sad Scrooge listed above or MrCarmady's roster of his 'White Whales'. I'm a tad puzzled as to where someone can access much of 'any' of the features of some directors who are both foreign directors and are far far more uncommon to locate.

Hell, to post my own blind spots feels like an embarrassment rather than an ambition.

My other question would be- Where do you even find any of these with english subtitles?
Helmut Käutner (seen 0) <---
Yves Allégret (seen 0) <--
Kô Nakahira (seen 0) <--
Boris Barnet (seen 0) <--

Gustav Machatý (seen 0) You've never seen 'Ecstasy'? Did you see 'Bombshell: the Hedy Lamar Story' (2017)
He did a few Hollywood films but he didn't appear to stay after the war ended. Now I'm curious...

These are the ones that seem to me as being the more significant canon directors that are also my weakest links.
If not for the fact that their names come up far more often
Raúl Ruiz (seen 3) 'Mysteries of Lisbon' (2010) masterpiece. 'Klimt' (2006) fair. ' Shattered Image' (1998) abysmal.
Edward Yang (seen 0) There's only 7 feature films by Yang and I've put him off for so long.
Manoel de Oliveira (seen 1) 'The Convent' (1995)' stars John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve.

[wba]

My other question would be- Where do you even find any of these with english subtitles?
Helmut Käutner (seen 0) <---
Yves Allégret (seen 0) <--
Kô Nakahira (seen 0) <--
Boris Barnet (seen 0) <--

I live in Germany, where I've actually seen most of my Käutners at the cinema from fine 35mm prints (retrospectives as well as repertory screenings). You can get to see all of his theatrical films and most of his TV output, if you know enough cinephiles here, but most stuff is without English subs.
I've also seen my 15 Nakahiras at film festivals and repertory screenings here as well (all from newly commissioned 35mm prints imported from japan), which all had English subs, so I guess they' could show up in your country at some point in time.
Haven't seen any Allegret or Barnet at the cinemas, though there were also retrospectives of both in Germany/Austria over the last 2 decades.

As for watching them in your home on a digital screen, I believe many of the works of those guys have been recorded/collected, ripped and subbed by fans worldwide and can be gotten from various film sites that specialize in such items.

[MrCarmady]

Käutner's Große Freiheit Nr. 7 is getting a Blu release in the States next month.
Otherwise, I have a few of his films I can put in the place.

[thoxans]

guess i'll keep getting more into trash cinema. need to carve out a little niche for myself, after all. nrh is the indian cinema guy. karl is the kool eastern european film guy. evelyn is the earliest of early cinema girl. even newcomer jiri has already become the esoteric wtf movie guy. maybe i can be the connoisseur of crap...? here's hoping