An Antiquated and Totally Indispensable System for Cataloging Film-Watching
What do we do with the entertainments and arts we’ve taken in? Are they ephemeral experiences, their sensations lasting only as long as it takes to view them before they disappear from our memory? That is to say, do they only serve the purpose of distraction, living squarely in the present moment in which they happen to us? Do you believe in documenting those experiences in some way, almost as a testament to what you’ve done with your time? People take pictures at concerts and stage shows but no one takes still photographs of the film they’re watching - it’s the same collection of scenes anywhere you see it. Do you go out of the way to try to remember every movie you saw, or for that matter every play or concert? Would you go as far as keeping a list? In other words, is a movie an experience you want to revisit for autobiographical reference (assuming you haven’t purchased it on video)? Or are they disposable products, with a limited shelf life that turns over with the frequency of a political discourse?
The answers to these big questions depend on numerous contextual factors and it would be foolish to think we could arrive at conclusions here. I mention them because I wonder whether people keep track of the things they watch, as I have. I guess when you love something as much as I love film, it becomes a necessity. Some people save ticket stubs. I write down titles. I keep a list of the things I’ve seen like they were souvenirs from places I’ve visited. In a way, they are. And yes, I write them down. I’ve been asked why I don’t just put them into an Excel spreadsheet. I have a good reason: To me, the watching of a movie is a concrete experience, not an abstract one. With regards to the two or three trips to movie theaters I make a week (now that we can do that again), I think it's not an abstract experience to sit somewhere and lose yourself in a filmmaker’s headspace and so the notation of that experience should be physical as well.
I’m a big advocate for physical media as something you can hold in your hand. I used to volunteer at an actual brick-and-mortar video store, which contained a library of 20,000 titles for rental on DVD, Blu-Ray and VHS. What was championed there is the idea that a physical disc is something you can watch anytime, not having to worry that a streaming platform will remove the title at the end of the month. As far as new releases, I try (and fail) to physically see in a theater everything that looks worth the time. Just a few weeks ago, I drove from my apartment in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood all the way to the Chatham Cinema at 87th street on the south side. It was the only place in town playing Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones, and since a new Ferrara feature is a must-see for me, the distance was not an issue.
I maintain my belief that there are theatrical viewing experiences that no home theater setup, no matter how elaborate, can ever hope to replicate. Despite high ticket prices, gimmicky presentation formats, horrendous offerings, indifference to rude audience behavior, and everything else many major theater chains do to make the experience as depressing and nerve-racking as possible, I still advocate for the experience of sitting in a room with strangers and seeing something on the big screen. I’ve been going to the movies my whole life and when just seeing them wasn’t enough, I decided to learn about them. Then I decided to make them and be in them (I’m an actor and performer, and I’ve appeared in three independent feature films). Then I decided to teach them and share them. It was the next step in the obsession.
Outside the despair of the collective human library in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, carrying around the artistic work you’ve absorbed can be very edifying in one’s personal life, as if you were bearing witness to the light of some echelon of human history. I’ve made it a point to commit to memory some sense of the total of films I’ve seen, such that I can usually tell you who directed it or the year it was made or who’s in it or what it’s about. Of course, I’ve forgotten a number of films, as not everything one sees is memorable. Other movies I’ve quite never been able to get out of my head (articulating my thoughts on these particular films as a means of freeing up mental real estate being one reason for starting this site). But I guarantee, if it's a movie and I’ve seen it, I’ve got it written down.
I’m jumping around in time here. This column will be like that. All this probably started because I had smart friends who were starting to talk about Dr. Strangelove and Hitchcock and early Woody Allen comedies in middle school (we call it Jr. High where I’m from). About 400 yards down the street from where I grew up in Lincolnwood, there was a Blockbuster Video and I’m pretty sure my movie addiction is partly due to the fact that the closest thing to us that I could walk to was a video store. Had it been a place to buy fishing gear, I’d probably have learned to fish my ass off.
I wrote the titles I wanted to see down on a sheet of notebook paper and crossed them off with each video trip. One film discovery led to another. I was such a loyal customer that I became an early test subject for a new loyalty rewards program Blockbuster was starting called Gold Rewards, which if you were renting as much as I did, offered a lot of free rentals for your money. More and more sheets of notebook paper soon became a thick mess of loose papers with movie titles being added and scratched off at the rate of about seven to ten a week. Soon I wasn’t doing my homework at school because of movies, just like little Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. My means of categorization was untenable. I realized by that time it made more sense to simply write down the things I’d seen - both at home and in the theater - instead of the things I wanted to see. So this system I had wasn’t going to work.
I eventually came into possession of Blockbuster’s “Greatest Movies of All Time,” paperback, which served as a guide for worldly discoveries. Their titles were like starting points that would take me down tributaries leading to even greater discoveries. As an avid reader, I had no trouble reading subtitles and by this time I was checking out The Seven Samurai, 8 1⁄2, Grand Illusion and The Seventh Seal from the store’s foreign film section and having my mind blown again and again. They had a Japanese anime section, and a section called Special Interest where you’d find Erroll Morris’ A Brief History of Time. I’d come home with a stack of ten VHS rentals, half of which I’d gotten for free.
Blockbuster’s promotional book, printed presumably to save its teenage store clerks from being in a position where they’d make the company look bad having to answer questions about movies they’ll never bother to see. Maybe a quarter of the titles in the book were to be found in a store on its best day anyway, and it’s only a stone’s throw title-wise from the AFI’s dull, unchallenging, xenophobic “Greatest...” list at that
A second video store near my house, called West Coast Video, had even more treasures that Blockbuster’s puritanical home office kept out of its stores. You’d bring them your report card each semester and get a free rental for every “A” you got. West Coast was where you rented Faces of Death. Or porn. Or in my case, Shinya Tsukamoto’s mindblowing, Tetsuo the Iron Man. The carpet, the walls, the shelves, the counter were all decked out in a garish vermillion gloss with twinkling light bulbs lining the walls. West Coast had a tawdry vibe about it. It was reminiscent of Times Square in its “Sleaze-o-Matic,” era and I loved it. I gobbled up my rentals. Like Martin Scorsese, I had terrible asthma and couldn’t play sports (which I was terrible at and had no interest in anyway), so my interests were in things you could do inside, and film became my spiritual possessor.
On top of that, I was now driving and there were the video stores downtown - Earwax Cafe, Facets Videotheque, a new place called Odd Obsession Video - and their ever-increasing DVD libraries housed more exotic treasures: Silent films. Middle Eastern films. Kung-Fu classics. El Topo. Russ Meyer. Eraserhead. It was magic. And I could travel into the city to see harder-to-find features in theaters, along with cool midnight screenings and revivals and restorations of classics that demonstrated the awesome power that great movies have in a live setting.
It was on a snowy night at the independently-owned, two-screen Wilmette Theater that my teenaged self saw the restored print of The Third Man for the first time. It was a seminal event in my life. Movies were not escapism, I thought, but something much nobler and more beautiful. I felt enriched by it. I remember hearing a voice inside which said, “This is changing you.” It took a while to realize how. It was Cinema - bigger than life and luminous. And I felt that I was in the middle of an Illinois winter looking at the summer inside myself.
title screen for The Third Man (1949) - when asked I tell people it’s my favorite movie
I would buy the 2004 edition of Videohound’s Golden Movie Retriever, an immense tome that was, as far as I could tell, the most comprehensive catalogue of movies in print. For each thing I would see, I would make a diagonal line at the top left hand portion of the title, converting the titles on my now many decaying bits of paper into marks in the book. Anything not in the book, as well as brand new releases I’d just seen, would be written down in the book’s blank end pages and after that, every other line on a spiral notebook. When I’d filled up a whole notebook eight years later, it was time to get a new Videohound and go through the whole compilation again, page by page, cross-referencing it with the marks in the earlier book AND the new releases and things in the spiral left out of the 2004 book that now appeared in the 2012 book.
As you can see, a given page in my Videohound guide has many check marks on it. Multiply this average give or take a few by the thousand or so pages in the book and you get a sense of the breadth of my film-viewing life.
I used to be proud of my ability to go to any page in my Hound guide, which is now a vital possession in my life, and look at a given title that I’d seen and tell you something about it. I'm not so sure I could do this to the degree that I used to because I don’t look within the book as much. It’s too much of a hassle to bust it out anytime I watch something. Since about 14, I’ve maintained a steady diet of about seven to ten films a week and in the last few years, that number has declined by a few because like all of us, I don’t have the kind of time I once did. Who does? Though I still devote a great deal of time to film and learning about it, I don’t go at the madman’s pace I used to. So adding to the system now is a smaller notebook where I write down titles I see - all titles. When a sheet in this smaller journalist-type notepad gets full on both sides, THEN I’ll go through and use it to check off the titles in Videohound and add the strays to the big notebook.
the big notebook, where I write down the new releases I see and titles that aren’t in the Videohound guide. This gets redone when I buy a new guide. The best system I came up with, and still kind of insane.
Still with me?
Again, doing all this gives me a basis for comparison, reference and recollection. It reminds me not to be bashful about what I know. It’s a catalogue of memories. A million Proustian Madeleines. Some people collect Hummels or sports memorabilia. I collect memories, the memories of these films. I like to think they add up to a sense of worldliness, emotional wisdom, history, humanity, spiritual language, enlightenment, pleasure and sadly, a fair amount of wasted time on a number of occasions.
the smaller notebook where a page gets filled up with every title I see and then written down in the big notebook or crossed out in the Videohound guide, rather than taking the guide or the big notebook out every time I see something. See the grease stain at the top left? And yeah, that handwriting.....
Mostly, they are a celebration. To me, watching a movie is like meditation. I am stepping out of my own shoes and walking in those of another person - a cog in the machine of empathy, approaching the world at large. Or I might be hiding from it. Film can also be a shelter from the storm. A harbor. Sometimes life is playing me like a violin - against my will. So I’ll rent something, or go somewhere to watch something where I’ll be played in other ways instead. All cinema plays me. The trick is to find the best music.
The reason for my writing this article is it’s now 2022 and I’m past due for a new Videohound guide and it’s time to go through and start the whole process over: cross-referencing, condensing, cataloguing and checking off titles in the now massive, Yellow Pages-size book. A new chapter in this area of my inner life. So many previously unreleased things are being released on video that wouldn’t have appeared in earlier editions, despite getting a theatrical release at the time they were made. So there are loads of new things in the newest edition to check off. I had November 26th down as the release date for the new Hound and it’s been pretty difficult to try to order. I learned it’s possible it may not even get printed. My jaw dropped theatrically when I found that out. I barely gathered enough breath to ask over the phone what they’ll do, as if the booksellers would know. Will they stop printing movie guides? After all, they’re reference books - a matter of record. Aren’t they like.....too important to have their fate be dependent on commerce?
hear no movie, speak no movie, see no movie
I suppose in the wider context of film-watching, such purism on my part, though heartfelt, is moot. I did say in the very first Flickering Knight article I posted for this site that though the business of the movie world is driven unsurprisingly by money and hype, its artistic evolution is driven by technological innovation, as difficult to admit as that may be. But it’s not just the films themselves that, being less and less a part of the physical world, are more elusive, uncurated and selectively offered than they’ve ever been. It’s the means by which those of us who would go to the trouble can file and sort the ones we’ve seen that seem to be drying up as well. What if lackluster sales and waning consumer interest means they never print my Hound again? The 2021 edition will have to do for now. But what’ll I do down the line? Will I have to devise a new system and stray from the one I’ve sworn by for the last 25 years? How do I keep this indispensable system as analog as possible in this wildly evolving digitized climate in which you can’t seem to put your actual hands on anything in relation to the cataloguing of imagistic media? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to this question yet.
I spent about five minutes checking out Letterboxd and in all honesty, I’ll probably never set up shop there. It’s just another gaping online void to shout into. Letterboxd is where amateur film criticism goes to die. Not just die but have its corpse pissed on and called a socialist. But so what? Your viewing history needn’t be demonstrative anyway. It’s not meaningless just because other people don’t see it, but that’s internet culture for you in a nutshell.
And it seems to me, if you’re really a true film lover - not trying to appear as some smart-alecky, online cultural commissar but as a pure subject on a journey through a medium of artistic expression - you’d devise your own unique system for keeping track. Start your own path. A new and personalized tradition you can connect with emotionally that keeps becoming something more over time like a patchwork quilt. I have my Hound and my notebooks. Now I also have this site. There are many others like it but this one is mine.
My Hound guide is my cinematic Coat Of Arms. Its physical existence means it can speak of love and devotion to an art form that I’m deeply passionate about, despite the position of perpetual precarity it seems perched on - like everything else at this current moment. Opening it up is like counting the rings in a tree stump. An autobiographical tabulation of experiences that you can hold in your hand, speaking perhaps of the predicament of becoming an addict and never entirely emerging.
It’s the kind of thing you take with you in your life’s search for meaning and fulfillment. The summation of temporal elements I encounter as I go to the movies and then later update and add to my list speaks of the journey of life in terms of my way of making sense of the world. Just me, my guides and notebooks, the seats, the dust lit by the projector, the entire universe on the screen and the other audience members in their seats, alone in the dark, on a journey together.
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