I was originally going to include everything I hadn't seen everything of in the appendix, along with all of the music, books, magazines and newspapers to give a rounded picture of the media I enjoyed in 2004. But to be honest, if I tell you I like watching BBC News, listening to female singer songwriters and film soundtracks, read Empire, Doctor Who Magazine, Retro Gamer and The Guardian and it pretty much covers everything. Enough of the lists.
Epilogue
What I inevitably learnt from the exercise is that I probably watch too many films. As I reviewed the contents of the diary before posting each day it was shocking actually how few days there were when I didn't watch some new film. It honestly hadn't occured to me that my consumption was so high especially when I consider that I haven't seen a tenth of what's out there to be discovered and that my grasp on film history is shakey at best. I watch Aguire: Wrath of God for the first time last night and it felt like an entrance into yet another world for exploring. Both exhilarating and maddening at the same time.
It's hard to put my finger on what drives me on to see more, to increase my film literacy over other pursuits, especially reading. What makes it so difficult for me to read books as much as I'd like but so easy for me to watch a narrative in two or three hours? Is it as I said in the introduction that my attention span has been battened down over time that I can't following anything without pictures. My father wants me to read The Da Vinci Code. I've told him I'm waiting for the film. Depressing or depressing realism?
More important than that, does it matter? The really good books won't disappear because I'm not reading them. Do we all at some point make a choice of the form our escapist fiction of choice is going to take, some go for pages, some for soaps and some like me for film, and are they all equally valid choices for the individual? They're all going to be mixed and matched to a degree but in most cases the percentages are going to be weighted in one direction.
Even if the result of what turned into a project ended up a little bit flat in the reading, it demonstrated a couple of things. That I'm still willing to try new things and educate myself, even if that's just in new film making techniques and styles. That I'm probably addicted because it's the one thing keeping me sane at the moment. That I'm going to wait until at least December before I decide what I'm going to do about 2005. And that things are going to change around here.
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