I should have done this years ago.
For all my working life I was privileged to spend my days talking and thinking about films – not just any films, but the great masterpieces that make the cinema the dominant cultural construct of our modern world. Now, instead of wasting my time on trying to keep the house manageable between the visits of my cleaning lady, I’ll be setting down as many thoughts as I can manage that have been filtered through my experience still bearing the tag ‘valuable’.
Most, but not all posts will feature aspects of cinema that are important in that they continue to be meaningful after several years or decades. There will be review of films, mainly ancient but also fairly modern. There will be reflections on the nature (in the ontological sense) of cinema and the film experience, and I will throw in curved balls from the other arts (I tend to call them ‘the lesser arts’) and current affairs.
As anyone who knows me can well imagine, I know where I am going, but have no great idea exactly what route I will take to get there. That will make the blog more unpredictable, which I hope will also mean less boring.
The emergence of youtube is an extraordinary resource for those seeking to explore and explain the cinema and I hope, therefore, to provide a plethora of links to illustrate my observations. Didacticism is the aspect of modern cinema (in fact all cinema), which I find most indigestible, especially when it is directed towards moral attitudes and so I hope to avoid this in these pages and ask only that readers consider my observations as attempts at understanding and certainly not Holy Writ.
That’s all for now and I leave you with a treat from 100 years ago: Easy Street, Chaplin, 1916. Click on the image to see full film. Enjoy! (You will see the reason for the title of this post…)
Keep watching the masterpieces….
