Happy New Year

It's a time for resolutions. So I'm going to try and keep up a little more with this blog. My film writing has expanded over the last two years from the occasional article for Film-Philosophy to an output of hundreds of pieces a year, if not thousands. This is all to the good, and includes chapters for books as well as the creation of a comedy site with a good friend, The Studio Exec. Add to this I'm still busy writing novels and screenplays. Oh, and I have a job. 

For anyone interested in cinema, there is always the nagging feeling of there being gaps in our knowledge. With the number of films being produced going up, and the availability now of cinema from all corners of the globe, it is difficult to keep abreast and at the same time make sure that you have a good background in the classics. I am also a perfectionist and collector, in the sense that I want to have seen all of a director's work. That is easy with someone like Kubrick. Less so with someone like Ingmar Bergman. Tarkovsky only made seven films in his (alas) short lifetime. Woody Allen has made 48. Bergman has 66 credits. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work I'm criminally ignorant of, has 45 credits despite dying when he was only 37. I can't see myself ever getting all the way through Fassbinder and Bergman, but Tarkovsky, yes and I really need to get a least the major works of Bergman and Fassbinder. Another director I feel ignorant of is John Cassavetes (12 features, very doable). There are also those directors who I know quite well, but who I want to go deeper. Kurosawa is one of these. 

I'm going to combine these two resolutions and use this blog as a way of plugging the gaps in my own film knowledge and writing about it as I go. I hope you'll find it interesting as I go. And please feel free to use the comments section so that we can have a kind of dialogue. 

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