It's been three months since I last posted here. The summer got busy for me with a number of family-related obligations, a promotion at work and an expanded focus on podcasting when it comes to documenting my movie watching activities. All these commitments and priorities have resulted in a lack of updates to this blog, and it's taken me this long to gather my thoughts about what the future may hold for Criterion Reflections. So I'll take a few minutes to summarize where things are at with me and see if I can use this process to resolve some of my own ambiguities about what to do in this space going forward.
Even though I didn't take the time to write up reviews for the Criterion films of 1966, I've already made my way through the list, watching them all over the weeks following the essay on Brakhage's Two: Creeley/McClure that I published in late July. For me, accustomed as I was to the habit of taking several days, sometimes a week or even longer to ponder and digest a film before blogging about it, it was quite liberating to just watch a movie per day, without the burden of responsibility to compose the kind of (relatively) comprehensive review that I had set as my own standard over the years since I started this series in January 2009. It's been a long time since I enjoyed such a long stretch of freedom in watching movies that challenged and inspired me, unencumbered by any particular literary expectations, self-imposed as they may be. As it turns out, that freedom has been both exhilarating and addictive, to the point that I now feel such a distance from the roll I was on from Jan. '09 until July '14 that it's clear I will have some serious work to do to recapture the magic, so to speak.
Which is all quite fine with me. I have no problem looking at the product I've created so far, covering Criterion films from 1921 - 1965 in a fairly thorough fashion that's pretty unique among all the blogs that are out there. Of course, that leaves us in the lurch a bit, as things really began to take off in radical new directions in 1966 and going forward, in regard to world cinema as well as popular culture in general. So the idea of just dropping this commitment altogether, of ceasing this journey at this particular juncture, does not sit well with me at all. So my task is to figure out the best way to continue the project. The concept of "blogging" itself is beginning to feel a bit outdated, to me at least, with the quicker, more immediate gratification of social media posts serving as a more convenient and responsive outlet. For a few weeks, I was using my Tumblr blog, with its greater emphasis on visual elements and a seeming lack of emphasis on the written word, to document each film I watched, but that habit fell off a bit as well. Letterboxd is another place where I have been charting my movie consumption, though even there, it's been more about noting the dates than typing out my response to a film. I could easily be more intentional about maintaining my cinematic diary, so for the moment, I think that Letterboxd is probably the most likely "next step" that I'll take. Another option is to revamp this blog in some way so that I can offer quick takes on the post-1965 movies that I have yet to commentate upon, even though I have some gripes about the limitations and general clunkiness of the blogger.com platform. We'll just have to wait and see what happens, I guess.
In the meantime, I remain highly committed to my podcasting and reviewing opportunities over at CriterionCast.com, where I host The Eclipse Viewer, contribute regularly to that site's Main Episodes, and compose articles discussing new releases to the Criterion Collection as they're issued from month to month. So I think I'll finish this update on that note. I welcome your feedback and questions, if you have any.