A Decade of Archives 1: 2012

2003

A month from today, this blog will be 10 years old.

I'll reflect on that amazing, terrifying fact at that time. For now, what I'd like to do is begin a series of occasional posts that dip into the archives. Barring unplanned events, personal and/or technological failures, etc., I hope to do 10 posts between now and a month from now — posts that somehow or other explore what's been buried here.

We'll start with the recent past, though I'm going to ignore this current year, since it still feels too present.

That brings us to 2012, which began with a post about blogrolls and ended with a post about some movies.

(To update that final post, now that I've seen more films from 2012, my favorite 10 would be: The Amazing Spider Man; Cosmopolis; Detention [technically a 2011 movie, but it didn't get off the festival circuit till 2012, so I think of it as a 2012 movie]; Holy Motors; The Kid with a Bike; Moonrise Kingdom; Oslo, August 31st; Premium Rush; This Is Not a Film; Zero Dark Thirty. Honorable mention to Cloud Atlas for being so ambitious and nuts and sometimes great; and to Django Unchained and Beasts of the Southern Wild for being movies that I still don't know quite what to make of them. And there are still important movies I haven't yet seen, e.g. Amour.)

Now and then I propose ideas for posts here and don't follow through. This happened in June 2012 when I fully intended to write a series of posts about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of my favorite filmmakers. The series didn't get beyond the first, "30 Years After Fassbinder: Where to Begin?" I could never narrow down my ideas well enough for a blog post. However, I am right now working on a video essay about Fassbinder's first films, and with luck it will be done in time to coincide with the release of Criterion's upcoming Early Fassbinder set. I hope to do lots more writing and video-making on Fassbinder in the future, but I am very much the opposite of him in terms of my rate of production.

Of the other 2012 posts that might be worth some new attention, my own choices would be:

Those six items cover much of the sort of material that this blog has been yammering on about for nearly a decade. I wouldn't want them to be the only things the success or failure of this site is judged by, but as the best representatives of a single year, they'll do.

As we dig deeper into the archives, I hope to spend more time on a few individual posts from each year, but 2012 wasn't very long ago, and I'm still roughly the same person who wrote those posts (well, the ones I still like. A few of them were written by an idiot).

What will become of all this? We shall see...

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