Film After experimenting on Twitter for the past six months, I've finally signed up for a Letterboxd account as a way of keeping a viewing diary. The idea of know when I've seen films always sounded preposterous to me, but as I get older, it's an excellent touchstone for remember what happened on various dates, even if for the most part all the days are roughly the same (porridge, sertraline, work, chicken salad, more work, dinner, film, daily dose of Doctor Who, Twitter for a bit, sleep). I can actually tell when various things have happened over the past couple of years because of the streaming dates for certain films on Netflix and it'll be useful to have this stored elsewhere.
True, this site used to offer a similar working memory, back in the emoblogging days (thanks to Caro for introducing me to that term) but now that people I've actually met in real life read this thing, I'm less inclined to be quite as personal as in the early 00s for some reason. Plus as I get older, I feel like I need to spend more time experiencing things than writing about them, especially since I'm working close to a full week which offers less space to be sat at a keyboard spouting off, apart from admittedly on Twitter although that still feels less permanent and more experimental than here even though they're both online and I can pretty much write what I want here too. Shrug emoji.
Anyway, my Letterboxd profile is here and here's a direct link to the diary page. Filling in the gaps is ongoing. Fortunately, uploading data from Netflix was a breeze. Keeping a record of everything I watched in 2004 doesn't seem so stupid now although how I wish I'd bothered to keep the dates when I repeated a similar exercise in 2014. Sadly when Amazon closed Lovefilm, they also deleted my entire watch history from back in the ScreenSelect days which was still on their servers until recently (not that you can tell from a dispatch date exactly when I saw a film) and the streams that remain don't have dates attached.
Other dates require some memory and detective work. I'll be heading off into the archives of this blog for various things, since more often than not I'll actually mention when I saw a film. My old MA course booklets have screening dates. But there's also some logic. I know when I will have seen some films because I know it was in the week of release and which day that would have been. Fan4stic was released on the 6th August 2015 and I saw it on the following Monday so that would have been the 10th. I saw Pulp Fiction on its UK release date so 21st October 2004. Same Groundhog Day. Same Philadelphia. Plus there's all the ticket stubs lying around.
Could this become an obsession? Possibly. But it's nice to have a project which taxes the memory, forces me to look into places I haven't been for a while. You can bet I'll be trying to find the listings for my uni cinema the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds between 1993 and 1996, perhaps published in the local newspaper. Every now and then I'll think of something else, like seeing The Revenger's Tragedy at FACT the week it opened, or a special premiere screening of Grey Owl at the Odeon (with Dickie Attenborough in attendance). There's also an RSS feed if you want to watch me recreating my film(watch)ography as it happens.
