Film Blogging

Michael Newman brings some needed medium specificity to the discussion of film blogging. I suspect he's right that one of the functions of the new medium will be a meeting ground between academic media scholars and educated, even self-educated fans and cinephiles outside the academy. I don't have a problem with writing for and reading from an insular community - I'm at the stage of my career when that is an obvious and overwhelming priority. But when I do have the time to really delve into the nonacademic film blogs out there, I can't help but be impressed by the seriousness and erudition of writers who aren't getting paid to be serious or erudite. Case in point: Girish Shambu's recent discussion of noir and crime film. Or a blog I just discovered, Film of the Year, which is proceeding through cinema history year-by-year, writing analyses of the movies, complete with footnotes; it's sort of a diachronic counterpart to my 1947 project. The author, Thom Ryan, is only up to 1934, so I will have to wait to see what 1947 brings.