It's now been a little over five months since I posted my last review here, and I'm happy to say that I feel fully rested, revved up and ready to get this chronological series of journal entries on Criterion Collection films going again.
The reasons for my absence have, to my satisfaction at least, been chronicled and communicated in various ways throughout this interim period - a few tweets here and there, comments I dropped in various podcasts, my earlier (...hiatus...) post several weeks ago. I've hardly disappeared or lapsed altogether in my practice of commentating upon this selective library of cinematic classics, with several individual reviews posted on CriterionCast.com and numerous recordings I've made about titles like The Seventh Seal, Red River, Seconds, Il Sorpasso, Band of Outsiders, Le beau Serge and Les cousins and all those boxed sets from the Eclipse Series that my pal Trevor and I have covered in the Eclipse Viewer podcast. On top of all that, I've spent quite a few hours viewing as many of Criterion's 2014 lineup as a full-time working guy with a family can manage in order to prepare my thoughts for the Criterion Cast's annual "Favorites of the Year" conversation, so that I could have a well-informed opinion on the topic. So yeah, I've been active all right, but it's all been to the neglect of this poor humble li'l site which I really do have to acknowledge has been the basis for whatever audience I've been able to cobble together to listen to my opinions and take my thoughts on these movies at least a little bit seriously...
But I'm really happy to announce here and now that my time away from Criterion Reflections has come to its end. I have enjoyed the break. It's been refreshing, even a bit liberating, to fully unhook myself from the disciplined routine that I tried with varying degrees of success to maintain since starting this project in earnest back in January 2009. (Yes, I did initiate the blog back in the summer of 2008, with a mostly random sequence of reviews that I tossed online, before I came up with the strategy of starting with the oldest Criterion title then in print, Nanook of the North, and working my way forward from there.) When I first embarked on this series, I was at a fairly critical junction in my journey through life. My kids had all just grown up and moved out of the house, after my youngest son went away to college in the fall of 2008. This shift in personal and family focus triggered a bit of a crisis in my consciousness as I struggled with how to redefine myself as I entered a new phase of my existence.
I've never really opened up much about the personal trials that I went through at that time, and I'll keep the details vague here out of respect to those closest to me (and for the sake of discretion, though a careful reader of those early reviews might be able to pick up clues embedded between the lines), but watching Criterion films and writing this blog was most definitely a crucial form of self-managed therapy for me. That impulse, almost desperate in its urgency at the time, along with a general enthusiasm for "the new" which I've learned how to marshal for the sake of productivity and self-promotion over the years, propelled me to cover a LOT of movies in that first year and a half or so, at a much more rapid pace than I've been able to maintain ever since. I'm glad to say that, within the first half of 2009, I was able to work through the worst of my midlife existential dilemmas, re-establishing my priorities a bit in the process, with the effect of greatly enhancing my enjoyment and appreciation for the simple things in life that I had regrettably taken for granted along the way.
That initial burst of effort on my blog also drew the attention of, among others, Ryan Gallagher and the other guys over at Criterion Cast back in 2010. They were engaged in a similar endeavor of focusing sustained attention on the greatest lineup of movies ever assembled on a single imprint, in podcast format mainly, more than in written reviews. A few conversations later, and I found a new outlet for publishing my stuff, and the form of my Journey Through the Eclipse Series that I added to almost weekly over the next few years. I still haven't covered all of the individual titles included in those sets, but I wrote up most of them, and at this point, I'm content to leave the Journey at that, now that I host the Eclipse Viewer podcast on a monthly basis, and the Eclipse Series has slowed down its release schedule quite dramatically as well.
The net effect of all these "sidelines" of writing and podcasting for Criterion Cast, along with other changes of life like significant promotions at work and new professional responsibilities acquired over the past few years, has been a diminishing of my ability to focus with undiluted intensity on watching Criterion films in their original order of release. And since I don't have any intention or good reason to relinquish my opportunity to create podcasts or new release reviews for that site, I doubt that I will ever return to the purity of my mission as I defined it back in 2009. And yet, I really did and still do enjoy the idea of experiencing cinematic history unfolding before me through direct viewing of these movies as they were released month by month over the years. As much as I've enjoyed the freedom of a break from that sense of obligation that I set for myself to maintain that schedule and sequence, I also missed the discipline and discovery that resulted from that practice. And I'm ready to resume it now.
But after six years spent in this process, after observing just how enormously the Criterion Collection has grown since I first edited my spreadsheet of titles back in 2008, and calculating how long it would take me to get "caught up" by maintaining a pace of anywhere between one and five full-fledged reviews per month, I recognize that a different approach to the films will be necessary. Yes, I have written about this before, in practically all of the "Year's End Review" entries I've posted on or around December 31 since the end of 2009. But my intentions now are much more clear, driven by an absolute requirement to pick up the pace if this project is going to serve the purpose that I now envision, which is to genuinely and personally inhabit the discovery of new growth, of a creative expansion in the horizons of what cinema accomplished over the course of my lifetime.
And this newly accelerated process will commence with the Criterion films of 1966 - a year that, as a four-going-on-five year old boy, marks my emergence into a more individuated and specifically recollected stage of consciousness. It was the year that I became enamored the old Batman TV series (which I just received yesterday in a comprehensive Blu-ray collector's set as a Christmas gift!) and thus entered personally into the vast and all-absorbing realm of popular culture. Other influences - Mary Poppins, the Beatles (by way of the song "Yellow Submarine"), any number of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, among others - also left deep impressions on me that year... though of course it's absurd for me to suggest that any of the Criterion films I intend to review here played any significant part in my life at that age, as they were all aimed at an audience that didn't include me. But they were part of the zeitgeist that affected my young and impressionable mind as my personality was beginning to coalesce, and my eagerness to fully ponder these cultural relics and gauge their formative influence on me and my peers of all ages demands satisfaction.
So I think it's significant that I took my break when I did - 1965 and earlier is a period that I will regard as a kind of personal "prehistory" even though I was born in 1961. 1966 launched a new era in my life, and will serve as the springboard for a new style and format in this blog. I intend for my approach in writing about these films to be more spontaneous, free-form, less deliberate and comprehensive than the more thoroughly researched and carefully composed reviews that preceded them. My take on a film here going forward might be little more than a few sentences, a paragraph or two, knocked out in the first 15 minutes or so after watching a film just one time through, before I move on to whatever is next without feeling the slightest twinge of guilt. While I am for the most part quite satisfied and reasonably proud of the study and contemplation that informed my earlier essays, I'm reluctant to maintain that standard for every title that awaits me on the list, since I know it will once again get me bogged down in the process. I will certainly grant myself the opportunity to indulge in a full-blown academic study from time to time (I have a hard time imagining that I'll just skip past something like Persona with little more than a few glib one-liners to summarize my thoughts.) But I'm more than likely to disappoint some readers (and probably even myself at some points along the way) with comments that fail to fully capture or respect the depth of wisdom that many of these films convey. I'll compensate for that oversight by including links to well-written, insightful reviews written by others, and I'll also free myself up to take a more experimental, perhaps visually creative and in any case less verbose approach than I've taken in the past (or even in the composition of this blog entry!)
So with that, I think I've adequately explained myself and expressed a bit of what I have in mind for the immediate future of this site. I do want to conclude with a genuine expression of appreciation for the attention that many of you have sent my way over these years, whether it's a comment on the blog, Likes on Facebook or Instagram, comments or RTs on Twitter, a private email, or just passing along a link to a friend. I'm delighted to be an active contributor to your enjoyment of great films and the long, lively conversation that goes on and on about them. I'm truly excited to resume my input here and take it in some new directions.