SCFZ

hi jal, i remember you and i prefer this scattershot approach myself. why complete filmographies! save some for later

rischka wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 12:17 pm hi jal, i remember you and i prefer this scattershot approach myself. why complete filmographies! save some for later

Ah, I know there's a good side to it... but it's not too cool for director polls here. I'll get into them eventually, someday, maybe!

And hi Rischka! I remember you of course, been following your posts and LB recs for a long while.

Just signed up today, so I guess this'll double as an introduction.

The first one that got me was The Fellowship of the Ring in 7th grade (9 years ago, which puts me at 21). My dad locked me in my room while he watched them with my sister because she had read the books and I hadn't. I was super jealous, so I powered through the books in a week or two and watched the movies myself. It was a revelation. The rest of my early development was a matter of completing lists: first the IMDb top 250, then TSPDT's top 1,000, then Rosenbaum's top 1,000. During this time, Au hasard Balthazar, The Gold Rush, Elephant (the Van Sant one), and The Dante Quartet were a few of my other big breakthroughs.

Recently I've been rewatching a lot of movies I recklessly blew through back in 7th-9th grade with more attention and care. I cycle through periods of watching very few movies (either reading or studying instead) or watching dozens per week. Right now I'm in the dozens-per-week stage (I have a gap year before heading out to medical school that I'm taking full advantage of), so maybe you'll see me around!

Welcome and glad to have you! Viewing your personal canon list on letterboxd, any one with that kind of taste is cool with me. Some good recs I'll need to add to my watchlist.

Nothing new here, but the first DVD's I owned were Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. That was senior year of high school, and my interest was still sparse. My regular viewing habits didn't develop until my second year in college, which was around the time I discovered Jonathan Rosenbaum. Weirdly enough, my obsession was totally mental for a good while because I satisfied myself by reading Rosenbaum and compulsively making lists of works I wanted to watch. From there his writing was later intertwined with a good dosage of Lynch (Eraserhead was and continues to be life-changing), Cronenberg, and some canonical Euro Arthouse (Godard in particular). It was only possible for me with the easy access of a uni library. Anyway, JR is my dad and Tarantino that weird uncle whose early influence I can't deny.

Great thread!

As a small kid like 3 years old, 4 years old, I always used to watch a lot of animated series in the mornings on TV when I woke up (He-Man and Brave Starr were my favorites), as well as some Knight Rider, A-Team and similar stuff on Yugoslavian cable TV, so I was already into moving images at a very young age, though I wasn't interested in feature films as such (and don't recall actively watching any). I didn't watch films until we moved to Germany in the late 80s, where I wasn't allowed to consume so much TV anymore. Thus, as some kind of alternative, I started regularly going to the cinema at my own from the age of 6 onwards and that's when I fell in love with the movies (and also started watching some on TV every now and then). Some of my earliest favorites when I was about 6 and 7 were Batman by Tim Burton, Conan the Barbarian by John Milius, Red Sonja by Richard Fleischer. Just regular stuff that a young boy would like at that age.

But I never gave cinema and films too much thought, cause I had been way more into music and literature ever since I can think. My obsessive cinephile life thus started by surprise (for me), at the age of 15 when I bought my first VCR and started taping movies from TV (four years later I had ammased a collection of 1000+ titles taped from cable TV, mostly foreign stuff with subtitles). My first film book I bought for myself was a monograph on Tim Burton, and as I also started participating in online movie forums from the late 90s onwards, this helped me to start reading and writing about films and such.

So I've been a film buff for about 20 years now, but I guess I've always loved moving images ever since I first laid eyes on them on TV. I just hadn't realized it until much later, cause moving images were considered more a way of "entertainment" and fun (like playing on the street with other kids) as opposed to the more directly "art-like" enjoyment I could experience through music and literature.

bure420 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2019 12:10 am Rischka (and others) which famous non American directors were accessable pre Internet?

really only a few. If you didn't live in a major city where they had a great videotheque with foreign films, it was a pain in the ass getting your hands on most stuff. TV was a much better option, but you had to wait a lot if you wanted something specific. So you watched what you could get your hands on. retrospectives at film festivals and cinematheques were the big deal back then.

On VHS it was mostly the older canonical stuff like some Bergman, some Fellini, a bit Visconti a bit Fassbinder. Watching even a dozen Ozu films at home was a sheer impossible task, but you could see more if you didn't mind un-subtitled stuff.

Overall you really had to have good connections, know a lot of people, have money and travel a lot, in order to get to see what you wanted.

When file sharing on the internet started to become a big thing in the 2000s and sites like KG began their work it was like the doors of paradise had finally opened up to the less privileged cinephiles of the world. You can't believe what a game changer the availability via internet actually was!!!! I don't think there has ever been a bigger revolution for film lovers of all classes all over the world apart from the introduction of movies on TV in the 50s and (commercial) tapes in the 70s.
I could now literally watch 1000s of films I had always wanted to see, but didn't know how to get my hands on without huge difficulties involved. It was like a revolution!

Also communicating on the internet with other people who love films! In the 90s as a huge cinephile in my late teens, I was living in a small town, and there was literally no one (not a single person!) around me who also loved films as much and with whom I could talk about movies and discuss them. If you were into film, the best you could get was some random person who supposedly loved watching movies (but was in actuality anything but a film buff - they were into horror films, or Hollywood, or just watched films every day at home without really being that interested in them; that kind of stuff)). When I finally met a true film buff roughly my age in the flesh (and became friends with them) I had already been an obsessive cinephile for over 5 years - and it felt a bit like meeting Jesus for a catholic must feel.

It's all really a bit hard to explain, if you haven't experienced that yourself. Without the internet, you had to be fucking active all of the time, if you really wanted to engage with what you loved.

rischka wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:42 am

i used to fanatically record movies on tv, and prided myself on my ability to edit out the commercials from my recordings by expertly timing when a commercial was the last commercial in a batch of commercials and the movie was about to come back on, and boom, i'd press that record button, and on the tape the movie would seamlessly pick up exactly where it had left off prior to that commercial break. booyah.

ha yeah this was a real skill

Fucking right!! I was like soooo proud of myself when i finally had develpoed the knack for it, and every second counted.

I had always had an interest in film. The earliest one I can remember being enamored with was Peter Jackson's King Kong when I was around 5 years old. I also loved science-fiction films like Alien and The Time Machine (1960).
But there were a few 'film epiphanies' I had. Firstly, when I was about 13, I saw Kill Bill, which got me interested in Tarantino. This was the first time I had actually paid attention to a director, and the form and style of the films themselves beyond just watching for entertainment.
From there I started getting into Scorsese, Taxi Driver was another revelation.
Shortly after that I watched The Deer Hunter at my dad's suggestion, which absolutely blew me away emotionally.
It was a couple of years after that, at about age 17, after watching Hitchcock, the Godfather films, and other English language greats, that I watched Bergman's Persona with my dad, who had an old DVD copy. That absolutely astonished me, and really opened my eyes to what was out there, and what cinema could be as an artistic medium.
I'm 20 now, and am still discovering new directors and films, with Tarkovsky being my current favourite (I'm not sure how he's viewed on this forum).

Kon wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2019 10:42 amI [...] forum

welcome! make sure to check out our sci-fi poll, which is going on now. hope you find the forum fun and informative. i know i still learn new things here all the time

thoxans wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2019 2:23 pm

Kon wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2019 10:42 amI [...] forum

welcome! make sure to check out our sci-fi poll, which is going on now. hope you find the forum fun and informative. i know i still learn new things here all the time

Thanks, and will do!
This seems like a good forum for more in-depth discussion with a smaller group of people

I feel that I got into movies somewhat later in life than most of my friends.
I never really watched movies at all until I was 12 as video games and TV were the most accessible form of entertainment for me. When I was 11 my father bought me an "iPod" which was really a Chinese knock-off that had the sole advantage of having a camera unlike real iPods at the time. Soon enough my cousin, brother, and I started making videos every day and putting them on YouTube for over a year. Then by chance when I went to the library I picked up a biography of Steven Spielberg, and while I was reading it I was amazed and I thought, "well he seems to be doing what I do but on a much bigger scale. This is what I want to do with my life." So I wanted to be a filmmaker mainly on the basis of what I had read and stills. That's when I started to watch "good" movies for the first time, which at the time meant mostly Oscar bait for me. I watched most of the Oscar best picture nominees that year and I slowly worked my way through films made by Spielberg among others. But I was mainly reading books about film and so I became acquainted with a lot of film history without watching it with a few exceptions like Nosferatu and Breathless.

I don't think I really became a cinephile until I was 16 when I went to a new school that offered a filmmaking elective. The first semester of the class was actually more like a film studies class, so the teacher showed us several Hollywood classics and we would discuss them. I remember what changed me was watching Safety Last! thinking that if a silent film like that could entertain me so much, then I should be open to watching silents and B&W films! At the same time I started watching non-American films on my own, mainly because I had seen Dancer In The Dark as a devoted Björk fan. Then I got into Zhang Yimou, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and then Yasujiro Ozu basically changed the way I understood cinema. From then on I tried watching everything I could get my hands on!

As a kid in the late 90s, I used to watch movies from time to time on Tv, but it was never a big thing though I still have memories from films I enjoyed watching at the time. However, during my teen, I started watching random Dvds I get from my friends, all were Americans films. Right in 2010, I got my first PC and started taking films more serious and began to be selective on what I watch. From 2010 to 2014 I watched a lot of Hollywood classics and famous Foreign films like Kurosawa's, Italian Neorealism, and French Cinema. In 2015 I discovered Letterboxd and it was a great place to discover a lot of overlooked/unseen films that I never heard of. Also, I took a few film-related classes which helped me a lot in understanding films. Now I'm almost done with school and hoping to continue my master's in filmmaking to enjoy this journey even more.

Always loved going to the cinema and watching the odd film on tv from a very early age. My main passion at the time was for music but film was right up there. At first I just watched whatever everyone else was watching and didn't really have a deep cinematic experience but as I got older this would change a lot. A change that started with the discovery of Goodfellas which just blew me away and showed what great cinema could be. Luckily got to see both Taxi Driver and Mean Streets and started to notice the name Martin Scorsese. I bought a book of interviews with him and his enthusiasm for all kinds of film sparked something inside me and film became an all consuming passion. Started reading other books and some magazines and started to discover films by the likes of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Bunuel, Cassavetes, Altman and all the rest and my life was changed for the better.
I always wanted to be a writer and had an idea to be a screenwriter so went to college to study film and started to write screenplays as well as all the stuff for college and then university. During this time and ever since have seen so many great films from all countries and all eras's and there is still so much left to discover.

welcome to scfz, meldini!

I've been a bit of a lurker for a while but haven't contributed much on here, although I did on the previous iteration of SCFZ. I'm Mars in Aries by the way. In either case, I felt like responding to this thread.

To respond to the thread topic, I'll start by saying that "as far back as I could remember" I was a film buff. As an elementary school kid my passion largely consisted of browsing the movie ads in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times, and I was always transfixed by the double page spreads to promote the newest blockbusters and/or highly touted critical darlings, even if was too young to watch a lot of them. I wasn't allowed to liberally watch R-rated films until I was 14 or 15, a bit late I know. When I was 8 or 9 my viewing mostly consisted of franchise films like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, as well as recent blockbusters at the time like Jurassic Park, Men in Black and so forth. I was born in 1988 by the way. My father had a weakness for a lot of those late 70s and 80s tentpole films, which spurred my desire to watch them, so I remember him taking me to see the Special Edition release of Star Wars back in 1977. There was also the time I received a Darth Vader costume for my birthday before I'd even seen a Star Wars film. My mother also bought me a VHS of Raiders of the Lost Ark on some random Friday night around the time I was 8 years old, assuming I'd enjoy it, which I did.

Between the time I was 8 or 9 and say 12 or 13, my tastes didn't mature much, aside from viewing more mainstream films I wasn't quite old enough to watch as a single digit-aged kid, such as James Bond films. Then around the time I was 13 I figured it was the *culturally responsible* thing to do to keep up with Oscar contenders, or at least the ones I was old enough to watch. This includes going to see films like A Beautiful Mind, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chicago, and Chocolat in the theatre. I also remember seeing The Pianist in the theatre, as well. About Schmidt is another film I remember seeing in the theatre at around that time, between the ages of 12 and 14, and the three Lord of the Rings features, needless to say. I also sought out plenty of Best Picture winners from before I was born or from before I was culturally aware. I believe I watched Schindler's List and the first two Godfather films for the first time when I was 14.

The next step after this was falling upon the AFI list and also "realising a lot of the greatest films didn't *actually* win Best Picture." So at 15, I broadened my viewing habits, relatively speaking, and "a whole world opened up" upon watching stuff like Goodfellas, Fargo, Raging Bull, Pulp Fiction, The French Connection(Best Picture winner but still), CITIZEN KANE and so on. So between the ages of 15 and 18 I watched the aforementioned films for the first time, as well as a lot of the other Anglophone film buff favourites, such as Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Spade Odyssey, Sunset Boulevard, Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, All the President's Men, Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, The Shining, The Deer Hunter, and Annie Hall. I'd also keep up with relatively mainstream "arthouse" releases like City of God and The Motorcycle Diaries at around that time while salivating over stuff like Lost in Translation. I also took a film studies elective my junior year of high school and we watched Dr. Strangelove, The Last Waltz, and The Apartment in that class, along with several others, and saw The Motorcycle Diaries at the cinema on a class trip.

Then at around age 18, which corresponded with my freshman year of college, I took the next step in being "culturally responsible" and tried to keep up with the standard mainstays in the TSPDT top 100. Admittedly, I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of sitting through "old black and white movies in a foreign lanaguage", but I took the plunge and fell in love instantaneously with The 400 Blows, although I couldn't really get into Jules and Jim at the time. I didn't come around to fully appreciating J&J in fact until I was 28 or so. Naturally, "discovering" The 400 Blows opened up a whole other horizon for me. Between the ages of 18 and 21, I watched various "foreign/arthouse" classics like 8 1/2, The Conformist, Blow-Up, Rashomon, L'Avventura, Pierrot Le Fou, Amarcord, La Dolce Vita, Fanny & Alexander, and several others. Incidentally, I only got around to watching Vertigo for the first time during this stage of my development as a film lover. I also went through my Paul Thomas Anderson phase in college after There Will Be Blood became such a critical sensation in 2007. Admittedly, by this time I hadn't yet completely shedded my addiction to keeping up with the shenanigans of awards season. For the record, that came at age 21 when I fell upon THE AUTEURS in early 2010. So I still made a point of watching stuff like Atonement and Slumdog Millionaire, even if I wasn't terribly enamoured with it.

I'll outline my experiences from age 21 to the present in a future post, so to be continued...

Welcome back, Renault! It's been a long time, but you're one of the first people I remember from when I joined in 2015, partly because you and Lencho of the Apes had the most distinctive usernames.

RenaultR wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 11:57 amI'm Mars in Aries

I remember you and I'm glad you're posting again!

Ok. I'll continue recounting my journey as a film lover now. I forgot to mention in the previous post I took a French cinema course in college when I was 19 but wasn't taken with many of the films assigned and shown, excepting The 400 Blows, which I'd already seen. Breathless and Contempt left me cold when I watched them in that class. Likewise, Jules and Jim. Barring those, it was a rather odd selection of films. There was no Rohmer, Pialat, Bresson, Melville, etc., considering it essentially appeared to cover the period spanning from the Nouvelle Vague to the present. After the four key New Wave films the course jumped right to the nineties, so there was Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Beau Travail, Nikita, Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud and some other films for which I can't recall the titles.

So now we can skip ahead to be "discovering" The Auteurs in 2010 at age 21. Needless to say, after spending ample time on the forum, where I confess I was not well-liked early on, I realised I was comparatively a bit of a rube in my film tastes. Therefore, I delved a bit more into world cinema at the tail end of undergrad, watching films like L'Eclisse, La Notte, Vivre Sa Vie, Stalker, A Nos Amours, The Piano Teacher, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, A Woman Under the Influence, Paris, Texas, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and several others. I also revisited Contempt at this time, having been indifferent towards it when I'd watched it in the film course two years earlier, and it became a revelation. Despite being thrown off by the film's narrative structure on the first viewing, its lush imagery had stuck in my mind ever since, and being exposed to various stills from the film on THE AUTEURS forum only amplified my curiosity, so I felt I had to give it a second chance. I probably wound up watching the film daily or almost daily for weeks, and it was the first Criterion, DVD or blu-ray, I ever actually purchased.

From college graduation onwards, I continued delving into the canon while participating on the Mubi forum for several years. Shortly after college I got around to watching my first films by Ozu, Bresson, Akerman, Vigo, Resnais, Ford(oddly, I don't think I ever watched a Ford before finishing college, although it's possible I watched The Grapes of Wrath at some point back then. I honestly can't remember), Rivette, Mizoguchi, Rohmer, Melville, Renoir, Dreyer(although I may have watched Passion of Joan of Arc at some point as an undergrad, not sure. Likewise Rules of the Game. I can't remember whether I watched it for the first time before or after graduation.)

From age 23 or so onwards, my film viewing experiences have all blended into one another to some extent with the obvious caveat being that I've developed new favourites as I've watched more films, and there are two many newer favourites to list. Also, in my late 20s and early 30s I've also come to appreciate some standard canonical films that I was relatively indifferent towards in my teens and early 20s, such as La Dolce Vita, The Searchers, and Jules and Jim. The most rewarding experience is rediscovering your passion after a period of burnout and being able to dive into the subject with the same level of enthusiasm you had at 22 but equipped this time with far more knowledge.

I think I started really getting into film around the age 13 or 14. I was watching pretty much anything internet folks were saying rose above the usual fare of blockbuster hits and tepid drama films. It wasn't until I stumbled upon Twin Peaks and Eraserhead, though, that I truly became aware of the depth of experience cinema had to offer. It was at that point that I decided I would make greater efforts toward learning all there was about film and broadening my palate as much as possible. I am now happy to say I've logged over 1,000 films from a wide variety of countries/decades/genres, and will continue doing so until the day I die!