ON BECOMING AN ACCIDENTAL FILM CRITIC

updates from the post-film diary liberation & an essay reflecting on whatever it is i've been doing here

Dear friends,

It’s been a little over a month since I wrote the last instalment of the film diary. I’ve not watched many films since, and I’ve not really had any thoughts about the films that I have watched. But here’s a run down anyway, off the top of my head:

L and I watched all of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings the weekend after the last diary went out and my only thought was: not long enough! Actually I also thought about how the extended editions contain a lot more eugenicist race science about Aragorn’s bloodline. I watched a really good documentary about Thelonious Monk in Paris, Rewind and Play (dir. Alain Gomis, 2022), which was on ARTE but might not be anymore. Strong recommendation there. I watched Working Girl (dir. Mike Nichols, 1988), because I saw a clip on Twitter in which Harrison Ford changes his shirt and a bunch of secretaries applaud him. I liked it. I spent a week in a hotel outside of Knutsford learning about how to be a successful arts fundraiser, an experience which I enjoyed more than I’d expected. No films there, but I did sing “Bat Out of Hell” at karaoke on the final night. The other day I went to Showroom to watch the rerelease of Three Colours: Blue (dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993) and decided that I do in fact still like movies. We had a Film Club and Tara picked Leningrad Cowboys Go America (dir. Aki Kaurismaki, 1989), which was very silly and enjoyable. I love Kaurismaki. That might be all of them. Oh, at some point I also watched The Village (dir. M. Night Shayamalan, 2004) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2000), both of which I’d seen before and neither of which I thought much of this time around, though I liked the former more than the latter. And I looked at my phone while L watched Sound of Metal (dir. Darius Marder, 2019) one night. Is that a lot of films in a month? Not compared to what I was watching before. I haven’t even been reading more books — where’s the time gone?

Below is an essay I originally wrote for another publication. The editor who commissioned the piece liked it but, reasonably enough, thought it was a bit too narrowly focused on my personal experience and suggested I post it here instead, to cap the film diary off. Maybe it contains information that you avid readers of the film diary will already be aware of, but I hope you like it anyway. Otherwise, things are pretty good. I hope they are with you too. I’ll keep using this Substack for bits and pieces, like keeping you informed of any new essays I write, and occasionally reflecting on what I’m watching, when I’m capable of doing so again. So stick around. And please do let me know what you’re up to, and if you’ve been watching anything good.

Take care,

A

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ON BECOMING AN ACCIDENTAL FILM CRITIC

Between the first of January 2019 and the end of February 2023, I wrote about every single film I watched. Every week, more or less, I watched between three and five films — sometimes fewer, sometimes more — and wrote around 500 words about each of them. I also wrote about what I did in the hours before I watched the film; I wrote about whether I’d been at work or not, whether I’d been hanging out with my friends or with my partner, whether I’d been drinking the night before and was hungover, what I’d eaten, whether I was feeling distracted or bored or depressed. I wrote about the weather, about spending the days pacing between the rooms in my flat. I wrote about the pandemic, inevitably; I didn’t really want to write about the news, about what was going on in the world beyond the sphere of my everyday life, but that stuff crept in anyway, of course. Every Sunday night for four years or so I’d assemble everything I’d written in the preceding week in Substack and then schedule a post for the following Monday morning. 2019-2023 have been strange years for me — lots of change — and this writing practice helped to anchor me in periods of uncertainty and instability.

I brought Roland Barfs Film Diary to an end after writing about exactly 1000 films. It was clear that I couldn’t keep on writing it forever, and 1000 films felt like a nice round number to end on. The total word count of the whole thing is a little over 565,000, which is not a bad rate of production over four years. It’s more than twice as long as Moby-Dick. When I started the project in 2019, it was initially as a way of trying to get myself into a writing habit: originally taking my cue from the novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene’s dictum of writing 500 words every day, I wanted to get break out of my old tendency towards procrastination, and find a way to get over my neurosis about my work being published or read by other people. It took a while for me to figure out the form and structure of the film diary, but after a couple of months it felt consistent and reliable, and I found I could write it without much handwringing or anxiety, which made my other writing go more smoothly.

When I started the film diary I was watching a good amount of films, but in no way did I think of myself as a film critic and I didn’t have any interest in becoming one. I wasn’t particularly fanatical about movies. I’d never studied film, but I liked watching them and thinking about them and talking about them. I definitely wasn’t interested in any pretence of critical objectivity — in fact, as I got into the rhythms of writing the film diary, I found I was more interested in reflecting on the personal associations that a film might have provoked in me, in thinking about the contexts and situations in which I’d seen any particular film before, than I was in offering a judgment or evaluation of the film itself. I certainly didn’t want to offer numerical ratings. Instead, I wrote about the context in which I watched the film — what my day had been like before I sat down to it. I always find myself frustrated when I read film criticism in which the critic writes as though they were a disembodied eye with no personal investment in the film, and I wanted to write in a way which reflected the fact that it was me writing about the film, not anybody else, and that I was always watching whatever film was in a particular place and time. 

The setting in which a viewing takes place can have a major impact on a spectator’s response to a film — I know this from my own experience, but also from talking to anyone who has ever watched a film. For me, there is a perfect setting for watching a film: I am in a spacious but not enormous cinema screen, which is quiet but not completely empty, on a Sunday afternoon; I’m either on my own or with my partner; I’ve just drunk a glass of red wine and an espresso. It’s extremely rare that I get to watch films in this situation: more often than not (especially so during the height of the pandemic) I watch them on a TV in my living room, or on my laptop while wearing headphones. If I watch Mission: Impossible — Fallout with my friends, and we’re drinking some wine while we watch it, and everyone is making jokes and yelling throughout, that’s a very different experience to watching it on a small screen on the back of a chair on an intercontinental flight. If I watch Jeanne Dielman at home after a day at work, I’ll likely spend a lot of the film resisting — or failing to resist — the urge to look at my phone and stop paying attention to the film; if I watch it in a cinema, at a weekend matinee screening, just after drinking a coffee, then I’m more likely be fully engrossed and absorbed in it.

I was writing a diary, and I was interested in the role that diaries can play in the critique of everyday life, providing as they do a space for reflection, for non-productive venting, for digression, rumination, distraction, without the need to make the links between thoughts explicit. The writing that resulted was a strange mixture of public and private, open and closed — I felt comfortable offering my readers a glimpse of my life, but always felt a need to keep something back. The more I wrote, the more I felt like the film diary was written from the position of a constructed persona, a particular version of myself, but as the writing of the diary took up more and more of my time and energy, I felt the boundary between the persona and myself blur. I was watching films so I’d have something to write in the diary. Or I wouldn’t watch particular films because I didn’t want to have to come up with anything to say about them; didn’t want to have an opinion about them. Some people told me they read the diary to get recommendations of what films to watch, but more people told me they read it for the slightly grubby feeling of reading someone else’s journal — for the insight into the mundanity and frustration of my everyday life.

Relatively late in the course of writing Roland Barfs Film Diary, I listened to an interview with the film critic A.S. Hamrah, in which he discussed Rotten Tomatoes and its role in collating critical opinion in the service of the film studios, rather than cinema-goers. Hamrah says he writes specifically so that Rotten Tomatoes can’t tell whether he likes or dislikes a film. This resonated with me: I wasn’t interested in persuading people to go and see particular films, or not, and I definitely wasn’t interested in helping studios quantify critical response to their intellectual property. I saw Hamrah’s stance of deliberate critical and stylistic ambivalence as something to aspire to in my own writing. But, at the same time, I also took great pleasure in making simple declarations of my own taste — I liked this about a film, I didn’t like this about a film — without feeling the need to justify my taste. 

Like many people who watch a lot of movies, I use Letterboxd to log my viewing, and I think it has an interesting but perhaps pernicious effect on my viewing habits. It’s good for keeping track of films you’ve watched, and films you want to watch, and no doubt it’s helped me find films I’d otherwise never hear about. But I hate the centrality it gives to numerical ratings, to scoring films — making it easy to dismiss a film before you’ve seen it because it ‘only’ has an average rating of 3.2. Personally, I refuse to give films numerical scores on Letterboxd. I often will give a film a ‘like’, signified by a heart, but I don’t really set much score by this critical mechanism — really it just reflects whether, as I’m logging the film, I’m feeling generous towards it or not. I like Doug Dibbern’s (@ddibbern) approach to numerical ratings: “I tend to give four stars to (almost) every movie partly as a critique of the capitalist-entertainment complex's hold on film criticism, partly as a critique of the disturbing gender disparity in the Internet film criticism community which is dominated by nerdy film boy geeks who bestow their star judgments parsimoniously -- it seems to me -- as the only means of flagging up their already enfeebled sense of masculinity, and partly just because I really enjoy movies.” Though occasionally Dibbern does give a film three stars or five stars, and then you know that he either really hated it or loved it.

While I was writing the film diary I looked around for comparable projects upon which other obsessive people had embarked in the past. I didn’t find anything very similar. Peter Bogdanovich kept a record on index cards of most of the films he’d watched in his life, but the notes about the films were brief. I came across other people who had kept similar personal archives of their viewing habits, but these were often more about recording the films that they’d seen than about reflecting on the experience of watching them. After her year-long stint as film critic for The New York Times in 1968-69, Renata Adler published all of her columns in a book called A Year in the Dark. She was writing about new releases, the movies she’d been assigned to watch and review for the readers of her publication; I wrote about some new releases, but I wasn’t writing to let people know what was showing in theatres near them. But the cumulative experience of watching and writing about so many movies was clearly exhausting for Adler, and she only did it for a year. Within three months she was complaining about it: “There is probably no more unedifying and, in many ways, valueless kind of communication than everyone’s always expressing opinions about everything … Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.”

After writing about every film I watched for over four years, I agree with Adler. The film diary was an interesting project, a good use of my time, a helpful writing practice, and through it I’ve been in touch with people from across the world. It was fun. But the pressure to formulate an opinion about everything I watched was exhausting. I could relate to Frank Beauvais’ 2019 film, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, in which the filmmaker records his obsessive viewing habits in the context of an extended depressive episode, and finds that he is unable to make something cohesive out of everything that he’s watched. Often I would find myself struggling to find anything whatsoever to say about a film which I’d watched in a state of total distraction, and writing a couple of hundred words about it would feel like pulling teeth. The film diary kind of made me hate films — or, perhaps worse, it made me feel apathetic about them. In the month or so since I finished the project, I’ve watched a couple of things, but far fewer movies than I was watching while I was writing the diary. I’m kind of sick of thinking about movies. But after each film I’ve found myself thinking of some Neil Young lyrics, from his song ‘Speakin’ Out’. After over a half a million words and a thousand films, I’m starting to think that Young already said everything that a critic can say about the experience of watching a film: “I went to the movie / The other night / The plot was groovy / It was out of sight.”