i wanna post something amazing but..

[Pubrick]

is a message board the best outlet for highly original analyses of a director's work?

i ask because for years i've wanted to post all my ideas about kubrick, with extensive supplementary material - pics, quotes, sound clips, all the good stuff. not the kind of boring analysis you'd get in an academic journal, or the wild, uncapitalised, often mispelled rants i have made in the past like the one i posted about PTA's films recently, but a really entertaining, hopefully engaging and thought provoking (and sometimes personal) take on how his films and his ideas connect with everything and how they hav illuminated my life and understanding of other filmmakers, artists, philosophers, people. at the very least something you probly havn't heard before.

but i've always stopped at the thought that some douche bag would just copy and paste it and pass it off as his own. like el duderino did once with something Ghostboy wrote (dude got caught). another issue i have is that after all the effort it would be completely pointless since no one would read it - like what happened to JB's breakdown of INLAND EMPIRE. any silver lining to be found in that situation is bullshit since the personal reward of a job well done, and the feeling of completion that comes when accomplishing something would be no more pronounced than if it hadn't been posted at all.

so my question is twofold:

1. is a messageboard the very LAST place to post good ideas? following the heirarchy: if the print article is the last refuge of a failed author, and the blog is the last refuge of a failed writer, then the message board must be where ideas go to die.

2. do you freaks hav any grand unposted projects? i know GT hypes a lot of stuff he never gets around to posting, and that children with angels has a blog he uses in kind of the capacity i'm talking about.

others like Pete hav tried to face the problem of the tree in the forest by falling in a public place like facebook, but look at how many ppl here bothered to say ANYTHING about his magnum opus, myself included.

[Pas]

Well obviously, this being a message board, you're gonna get a lot of tl;dr (noobs]).

I don't know about the pete magnus opus (which says a lot about the hype it got too) and I followed your link to JB's article and the intro to his link wasn't particularly interesting, it goes: "So... I wrote a little interpretation of INLAND EMPIRE. It has pictures and stuff." Doesn't give a whole lot of importance to the thing, even though it looks very in depth after you click etc.

If I was gonna put something very big and important to me on here and wanted to get read, I would make sure it gets read by:

1: Talking about it before hand (check in your case)
2: Writing a little intro that's pretty short and makes the reader interested. Graphical is best.
3: Make it a series, because few will read a post more than 2-3 MSWord pages long. By making it a series of ''articles-posts'' you also ensure discussion on every subject you touch and not a single one in the whole thing with a bunch of tl;dr replies that provides no discussion at all really. You can write it all, and then post parts every couple days or when the discussion on the last part has faded etc...

that's what I would do. As for stealing it, you can host it elsewhere to make sure it's stays on the internet and if someone does steal it and make money off it, than you sue him and get all the money anyway.

EDIT: Most tl;dr messages tend to be really boring too, even when you do read it all. You can blame the reader for not reading something, but more often than not it's the writer's fault. I would put humor in it, which is one of your main strenght anyway.

[Reinhold]

submit it to cinema journals. if they don't want it, blog it. if you don't want to blog it, post it here.

no matter what you do, the copy/paste thing is a concern.

btw, i don't think JB's inland empire review went unread. i know i read (most of) it

edit: do you have the time or interest in making it flash? i can host it on my site for you.

[Fernando]

just for the record ive been waiting for part 2 on your cmbb review. also curious to know what you thought of where the wild things are.


your idea about kubrick and the way to present it sounds awesome, and I for one would read it all and try to chime in, I dont know if I'll give great insight because for some odd reason I struggle to put my ideas in writing, otoh I remember having great chats on msn with you about ews and lots of other things, anyway, im very interested about this.

1. is a messageboard the very LAST place to post good ideas? following the heirarchy: if the print article is the last refuge of a failed author, and the blog is the last refuge of a failed writer, then the message board must be where ideas go to die.

don't know about that but it all depends, who are you interested in reading this?? obviously you'd like some of the ppl here to read it, so this place is only fitting to talk about it, if you want to reach a wider audience maybe post the link somewhere else so ppl come here or create you own blog.

I like what pas suggested, and you already talked about it (1) and you want to make it with media too (2), and your idea already sounds like a series (3). that sounds great to me.

2. do you freaks hav any grand unposted projects?

sadly nope, my great project was that xixax's avatar i did last year i think. 


i hope you give this a go.

[Pas]

submit it to cinema journals. if they don't want it, blog it. if you don't want to blog it, post it here.

Reminds me of my mom when I was 17 : "You know so much about movies, you should write to the paper and offer them your services as a critic!''

Fuck journals and FUCK blogs. Post it here in an interesting manner, and we'll read it, discuss it and have a ton of fun. The main point of my previous post was just not to make it a 30 pages thing no one will read.

btw, i don't think JB's inland empire review went unread. i know i read (most of) it

There was not a single reply man.

edit: do you have the time or interest in making it flash? i can host it on my site for you.

Can't read stuff on flash for some reason. hate it.

[hedwig]

well i'm excited. i hope this includes the super-secret crazy theory on The Shining you've been hiding from me for all these years.

to answer your question about message boards: no, it's not the last place to post good ideas, in fact it's a great place to post ideas-- IF you trust and respect the community of members. are you looking for feedback or just readership?

if it's feedback you seek, i'm sure there are a couple xixax members who would be happy to read your work and give a response (wink wink). if you just want readers, i imagine you'd want a broader audience than just xixax. blogs ain't so bad.

better yet, if you're worried about stealing, copyright that shit and send it over to visual-memory.co.uk. then post a link here.

[Gold Trumpet]

i know GT hypes a lot of stuff he never gets around to posting

Yea I know. It sucks because my schedule will open up a little bit and I'll get excited to do a project, but then new things at my school will come about which means I get thrown more things to do. It ends up killing my indepedent ideas, but I need to stop making promises altogether here.



I would say use this board as a launching pad. When professional students want to try out a paper, they sometimes take it to a conference to get feedback. I would recommend use this board for that same purpose. Sometimes you get nothing and are disappointed, but sometimes you get good feedback which helps you re-evaluate your thoughts on whatever you were thinking. Alexandro has called me rigid in my thinking before by saying that anything anyone says will not change my point of views, but when you're defending a bigger piece, a lot of things really change your position and help you sharpen the points you want to get across. It does so because you're in constant wonderment about how much of what you're saying is really gelling with others. This board has done that for me a lot. It has made me realize that certain things I thought were ready to be written about were still in first draft stages at best.  

Then see if you can take your piece to the next level. Someone recommended a journal, but I don't know if that's a good idea. Journals are rigid and they want you to follow a protocal of how you approach something. You have to direction your project to their stipulations the way a scientist does for their theories to make them legitimate in the science community. If someone's ideas aren't already done to their concerns, it's a strain to try to carry them over. I would consider linking it to a blog or website and trying to affiliate the project with a good network. You would still be just an amateur writing on the internet, but you would put your project amongst a bigger community if you can link it to the interested. Their feedback and viewings could make your piece more legit, plus they could leave more feedback which would help you guide the project even more.

[I Love a Magician]

just email it to me and i'll read it right up

[picolas]

[size=8]YOUTUBE IT[/size] and post a link. youtube film analysis can draw huge crowds/discussion and it's always yours because it's from your account/you're narrating etc...

there's that irish guy i was introduced to here:

his monolith video has 181,213 views and 812 comments. and it's not even very well put together.

there's also this amazing guy who recently posted a 70-minute analysis of the phantom menace beginning here: (this is seriously genius)

as you can see it already has over a million views and this part alone has over two thousand comments. and it was posted less than two months ago.

by simply doing a voiceover and adding film clips and perhaps being funny you can get to a lot of people.

[polanski's illegitimate baby]

That Space Odyssey review is creepy but then again, the film is in itself more frightful than horror. Actually, i find horror to be comedy and comedy to be horror now that i think about it. But, generally yes, if you do something like that video i'd be more inclined to check it out as it is hard to recall particular visuals. I'd be happy to see more analytical work done with art house directors. If you can change my mind from thinking that Harmony Korine is a sadistic exhibitionist you'll have my gratitude.

[children with angels]

It is indeed sad that most people don't want to give too much time to reading and responding to in-depth writing, but I've come to realise that this really is just the nature of the board, and perhaps message boards more generally: it's not what people come here for. It says a lot that the threads that get most fondly remembered are the ones that involve the riffing and developing of gags - not just because they're funny (and they are), but also because it's what people want to contribute to: they grow, they take on lives of their own, because (I would guess) people are more willing invest the shorter time it takes to engage with and add to a joke rather than a critical reading. This is why Green Screen continually fails as a forum for discussion: it's not why people are coming here.

Having said that - just because people don't comment on analyses, it doesn't mean they're not read. I was struck by the fact that when GT and I were arguing about There Will Be Blood's 'form' and 'content' a while back (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=10199.0) no one was commenting, but when Losing The Horse chimed in to say people should be following, two people immediately added that they had indeed been reading, and I would guess a number of others had been too. Equally, my piece on United 93 (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9678.0) has never had any comments, yet has apparently been viewed 2,975 times. People may not want to contribute for time/whatever reasons, which can be dispiriting, but this doesn't necessarily mean that what you write is being ignored.

However, ultimately it does come back to the fact that this really isn't the forum for what it sounds like you're wanting to do. In terms of other outlets: I would guess what you've got in mind wouldn't be wanted by journals, and you probably wouldn't want them either. As GT said, most journals are very much in the academic mindset, and would require you to change your style/approach in ways that I'm sure you would find unacceptable.

One thing the world really lacks at the moment (i.e.: since the establishment of film studies meant film criticism was split into impenetrably 'high' and crassly 'low') is an institutionalized (that is: funded) forum for film criticism that sits somewhere between the academic and the journalistic: that's serious but not dry, in-depth but passionate, intellectual but entertaining. There are a few examples (Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound), but they tend to lean towards the dull end of the spectrum. For a number of years I tried to keep a website going that walked this line, but I recently abandoned it for various reasons. Hopefully I can resurrect something like it in the future.

Anyway though, for the meantime I would say that blogs really are the way forward in this respect. There are a huge number of serious, vaguely-but-not-totally-academic, film blogs out there dedicated to in-depth discussion of movies. Even on those though people are often starved for REALLY engaged, serious analyses. If you started posting a bunch of pieces in something like the style of the one you wrote on PTA, and linked to the right people, I would imagine you could get a lot of interest from people who are actually looking to read and get involved with just your kind of thing.

(Finally, sorry Picolas, but I just have to say:)

irish guy

??!! Scouse, mate.

[Stefen]

It's a small message board and we bully all the n00bs out.

[I Love a Magician]

Anyway though, for the meantime I would say that blogs really are the way forward in this respect. There are a huge number of serious, vaguely-but-not-totally-academic, film blogs out there dedicated to in-depth discussion of movies. Even on those though people are often starved for REALLY engaged, serious analyses. If you started posting a bunch of pieces in something like the style of the one you wrote on PTA, and linked to the right people, I would imagine you could get a lot of interest from people who are actually looking to read and get involved with just your kind of thing.

along with what else you said, i read plenty of great film blogs with pretty in depth and i've noticed that they often receive very little in terms of comments and such. i know i spend my days at work just reading and reading about movies but i comment maybe once a month. so things are being read even if there's not a lot of feedback.

[©brad]

This thread is very encouraging and makes me happy. There are some great thoughts here, particularly Pic's youtube idea, which could be quite epic.

P post the fucking thing.

[modage]

I would agree:

YouTube analysis would be entertaining and probably have the broadest reach.
If not, grab a blog and put it up there, broken up into entries.  Repost here.
Or try submitting it to ThePlaylist!  Maybe they will run it as a feature.