SCFZ

pabs wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 5:34 am It seems there's a consensus here with regard to 80s films. I'm not surprised. So much rubbish was made that decade, especially in the USA. Maybe it was because the decade of Reagan, the cardboard president, celebrated immaturity and cheap thrills?

Nah, I think it's more the other way around. The 80s brought a lot more independently produced films thanks to video, and thanks to video people could also watch more films from other countries as well as older films. So, in effect, people just haven't seen "the same" films as much as they did in previous decades, so the general "consensus" that existed about all the decades before the 1980s, the general waay of talking about what films one had seen, and what were valuable films and what were films that could be neglected, got lost. After the 1980s there isn't any real general idea about decades and "what they were about" anymore: people aren't telling the "same" stories about the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, but everyone had and has a much more individual(ized) experience now.

Because of that general shift in what audiences watched, the 80s became this kind of myth of a "lost decade", where people started saying, "it's ok if we don't have a general idea about that decade, because nothing worthwhile was going on", and somehow everybody agreed to identify the decade with the US, Reagan and blockbuster films and action and horror films, and ignore everything else.

greg x wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 8:03 am

I'd swap my 2010s with your 80s.

I'd do it too. Just gotta wait until someone develops a swapsies machine and we'll be set!

But honestly, this must be the worst thing about my filmwatching: all those hundreds of terrible films from the 21st century I had to sit through because of friends, partners, festivals and my own laziness...

kanafani wrote: ↑Sat Sep 07, 2019 7:43 pm

wba wrote: ↑Sat Sep 07, 2019 4:13 pm Very interesting!

Could you do something like that for me as well?

Here ya go

Thanks kanafani, you're the best!!

This is so fun ! I love stats. Super neat to see the numbers.

Thanks for running the numbers for all of us, Kanafani! I pulled a similar breakdown from another film database where I've cataloged more of my viewings (4,977 on there vs. 3,418 on Letterboxd) - still largely the same result though, skewing heavily toward the last two decades.

wba wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2019 8:04 am Nah, I think it's more the other way around. The 80s brought a lot more independently produced films thanks to video, and thanks to video people could also watch more films from other countries as well as older films. So, in effect, people just haven't seen "the same" films as much as they did in previous decades, so the general "consensus" that existed about all the decades before the 1980s, the general waay of talking about what films one had seen, and what were valuable films and what were films that could be neglected, got lost. After the 1980s there isn't any real general idea about decades and "what they were about" anymore: people aren't telling the "same" stories about the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, but everyone had and has a much more individual(ized) experience now.

VIDEO huh. fascinating.

Seems like I really need to import my ratings to Letterboxd ... been sitting on that for far too long.

Luckily I do have a word document where I keep track of all the films I have seen (year + decade) so compiling this did not take too much time.

Note, I have only kept track of feature-length films (40 mins or longer), leaving the 1890s non-existent, and the first cinematic 00s with just one entry.

All: 9233

1900s: 1 = 0%
1910s: 62 = 0.7%
1920s: 632 = 6.8%
1930s: 606 = 6.6%
1940s: 585 = 6.3%
1950s: 913 = 9.9%
1960s: 1198 = 13%
1970s: 1462 = 15.8%
1980s: 787 = 8.5%
1990s: 839 = 9.1%
2000s: 1351 = 14.6%
2010s: 801 = 8.7%