Well its been a year since I started this compulsive cataloging project and in that time I've gone from an understated review of quite possible my favorite film of the decade to roughly 55 reviews and three whole followers. Tongue firmly out of cheek I have to say I nevertheless feel accomplished. Though my reviews began in January I didn't think to share them with the world until this day one year ago when I think I either began taking myself more seriously or was really needing some sort of random validation via distance contacts on Facebook shamefully tagged in notes of self-promotion. Either way this blog has been a big part of my life this past year. Around the same time I began posting here I decided what I really wanted to do was attend film school. Far be it from knowing how this would happen I nonetheless became intensely focused on the idea. As of December of this past year I was accepted into the Visual and Media Arts program at Emerson College. I will start as a Junior in the fall, will be in college at the same time as my 17 year old sister and will graduate after pretty much every acquaintance I ever had in high school.
However, I am happy. And I am truly pleased with this blog's progress. Though I sometimes feel critically intimidated (my current periodical film sources, Sight & Sound and Film Comment have just recently published their [understandably] staggering year-end and decade-end lists) I find comfort in recognizing the limitations (read: potential) in my critical voice and the evolution of my viewing capacity. Each film adds depth to my understanding of the history and culture of the medium.
I realized some time ago that, at least for me, film criticism is an art. While this might seem obvious, it considerably helps in figuring why, after a year, I continue a project of cataloging and creatively analyzing an artform that is expanding faster than I, or anyone else, could possibly hope to keep up with. It also explains why an absence of commentary on my abilities or perspectives has hardly hindered my desire to continue. One creates art first and foremost for the self. This blog has become, in the last 365 days, as much a part of me as anything else. Though I may share it willingly, it is more of a personal memoir, a cataloging of my own growth, than any means of asserting myself as a serious voice in the film world. I will be the first to admit that I am no more than a whisper. But this is still very import to me.
I sincerely hope that 2010 and the years that follow find me even more harmoniously connected to the film world. There is so much I have yet to see that sometimes I find myself (embarrassingly) quivering in anticipation while at the video store or the library. Each film is an experience despite (and sometimes because of) its quality or lack thereof. That is what I mean to record here. Written between the lines of this blog is an ever expanding love and respect for the world of film, to which I am eternally grateful.
- Kevin
ps: To relieve some of the nervous tension of such a prolonged and supercilious eulogy here's another cake. Thanks for reading.
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