>>6713
Nice.
I'm reconsidering what I wrote originally, because it sounds pretty unenthusiastic and boring. I've been thinking a lot over the last few days, and there's actually pretty big potential in this idea. There are a ton of underground music blogs, often they get popular and then become labels or bigger websites, like TinyMixTapes. There isn't much of an equivalent for film; sure, there are a decent amount of personal blogs and things, but there's no center for finding good content about non-mainstream film. FilmComment is alright, and TheDissolve was good for a while, sometimes less than good, but it's no longer around.
Basically, I can't think of any websites with a lot of content devoted to specifically arthouse/foreign/old/non-mainstream film, and I do think there is an audience for that. I think we would be in a unique position to create that kind of blog/site, and I think the possibilities for growth are endless. Cahiers du Cinema was started by a bunch of film fans, and they became one of the most influential voices on film theory and criticism. The amount of resources they had back then were incredibly limited compared to what we have now. With the internet, we have access to just about every movie ever made, every book ever written, every magazine article and piece of film criticism; to publish the content doesn't require a printing press or money, it's free and can be done with a few clicks from the comfort of our own homes. The barrier for entry is so low that success is not only conceivable, but easily achievable.
Not to mention that we have a built in international community of film fans who have experience writing, at least as far as it requires writing to participate in a forum, but maybe beyond that. I personally have written film criticism for my college newspaper and personal blogs over the years. But experience doesn't matter, as long as we have passion and a decent number of people contributing decent content. I know the site hasn't been very active recently but at one point it seemed like there were at least a few dozen people on here, and people who genuinely care about film.
What I'm talking about is essentially crowd-sourced film critisicism, and if at least a few people were interested we could really get something done. We could be the Cahiers du Cinema of the internet age, or even an entirely new way of creating a film journal/blog. 4chan and 8chan and forums in general are some of the most insane things that have existed in the history of humanity, from a theoretical/sociological perspective, and I don't think anyone has even begun to grasp what they are, or the possibilities of what could come from them. On 4chan, /lit/ has written multiple books, which seems like a terrible and unreadable book, but they actually DID something. With a little bit more focus we could do something too, turn the dynamic of a forum outward from insularity and exile, into the public sphere, and see what happens. Lately in my life I haven't had much to excite me, but the possibilities of this are exciting to me, and I hope some of you can see what I'm seeing and share some of the enthusiasm. Maybe I'm just manic and this all sounds naive, but I'm interested to hear what people think. Send an email my way if you have any interest at all.
