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 (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=10711.0). 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 (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=10863.msg285480#msg285480), myself included.
Well obviously, this being a message board, you're gonna get a lot of tl;dr (noobs] (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr)).
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.
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.
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.
Quote from: ρ on January 20, 2010, 11:37:33 AM
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.
Quote from: ρ on January 20, 2010, 11:37:33 AM
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. :yabbse-undecided:
i hope you give this a go.
Quote from: Reinhold on January 20, 2010, 12:50:29 PM
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.
Quote from: Reinhold on January 20, 2010, 12:50:29 PM
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.
Quote from: Reinhold on January 20, 2010, 12:50:29 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: ρ on January 20, 2010, 11:37:33 AM
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.
just email it to me and i'll read it right up
[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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P95NWAHWLrc
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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI (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.
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. :)
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:)
Quote from: picolas on January 20, 2010, 05:45:00 PM
irish guy
??!! Scouse, mate.
It's a small message board and we bully all the n00bs out.
Quote from: children with angels on January 20, 2010, 07:23:44 PM
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.
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.
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 (http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2008/02/playlist-is-looking-for-few-good-people.html)! Maybe they will run it as a feature.
thanks for the feedback everyone, some of these ideas are very encouraging. others not so much, but that's cool.
maybe i should hav been clearer, i havn't written anything postable yet -- the reason was always ambivalence about what format to do it in, considering i quit the board for two years and will probably leave again if i'm to have a rich fulfilling life, it didn't seem worth the effort.
- absolutely couldn't do a youtube clip cos i don't like the sound of my voice THAT much. and i couldn't maintain a hilarious character like the dude with the phantom menace did (excellent link picolbug).
- the blog format is the most obvious and flexible, but i think in the end i think i will just post it here in shambles like pas described, text and pics with compromises in the length and depth of analysis. the great thing about this format is it offers plenty of flexibility in the STYLE of writing, tho not so much in the kind of media i could employ. maybe a combination, using this to iron out my ideas and then post them (for no reason at all other than it seems a bit more "mine") on a blog that no one will read.
that's all fine with me cos i don't think i could possibly be more thorough than the excellent analyses already out there by freaks like Rob Ager (the irish dude pic mentioned) and the dude who was seated at the right hand of kubrick (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9134.0) and then got demoted after proving himself to be a right douche (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9331.0). -- actually that last one is perfect example of why the format matters and how the ppl who silently praise you in one place could turn out to be inadvertent destroyers of your mind in another. we broke that dude's brain!
a small rant right now cos my brain juice is flowing: a simple correlation occurs to me: in cases where long posts are ignored, and it could be said equally for extremely well thought out analyses on websites/blogs etc, the cause is not complexity in itself, but simply that at some point the reader has retreated to a state of awe at the effort taken by the author and a kind incomprehensibility at the MAKING of it, while not attempting to bypass all that and simply think about the points, lucid as they may be. this strikes me as blatantly similar to the reaction most ppl hav to great analysable works themselves. it seems that a truly significant interepretation must contain an element of painstaking exhaustiveness, and that the closer a reader gets to the truth of a work in developing their analysis the more he ceases to be a reader and become a creator himself. a great analysis could never be BORING, if done right there is no way it possibly could be.
so with that in mind i'll think things over for a few more weeks (the wendy defence), as i take care of some fairly mindless tasks in the real world.. also i'll try to think of a blog name.
plog
edit: i don't know how they handle submissions or whatever, but you might try the house next door (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/)
i like the plog idea. Pubrick could catch on. albeit, klog could work too.
Quote from: ρ on January 21, 2010, 11:20:17 AM
- the blog format is the most obvious and flexible, but i think in the end i think i will just post it here in shambles like pas described, text and pics with compromises in the length and depth of analysis. the great thing about this format is it offers plenty of flexibility in the STYLE of writing, tho not so much in the kind of media i could employ. maybe a combination, using this to iron out my ideas and then post them (for no reason at all other than it seems a bit more "mine") on a blog that no one will read.
hope you do this. there is a certain unique rhythm to your reviews/ analysisis that i'm pretty sure most here dont skip over. it's catchy
(wow im waxing ur board). but honestly, your long, thoughtout posts dont come off as some dude sitting there with his synonym book while clacking out his little big ideas like some of the longies i skip over do
(not namely here, btw, talkin blogs too).
and in terms of this place: at least there's plenty of rich thought and worthy eyes on this board compared to most others out there where the task wouldnt be a waste.
I don't post here often/am not well known so take this with a grain of salt but why don't you find someone you can trust, whether it's someone you know in person or someone that you reallllllly trust on these boards, and have them read it out loud and post it on youtube? Write some kinda script/format something for them to read. You'd never have to see their face.
It could get featured on a lot of film blogs and that sort of thing, and does it really matter whose voice it is? Just make sure that your name is listed as the author and maybe even copyright what you write. I only say this because, as someone definitely said before, you'd get so much more exposure from people watching a video rather than reading...it's definitely the best way to reach an audience. Plus you never know what could come out of it in the future. I've also (surprisingly) read some of the best discussions about films in the comments sections of blogs and sometimes youtube (yes, seriously) after one of these types of videos. I don't know why, but that's what I've experienced.
I don't know if there's something very dumb in what I've said, I just don't think that the voice matters too much and from what I've read you saying on these boards (the thing about pt anderson's movies you posted recently) I would really like to read/hear what you have to say, and I think that you could get some notice for it.
P, you're definitely funny, and really i know what you mean, and we may suffer from similar problems in this dept.
Namely though, i think it just boils down to doing. Like someone said, if you get that itch, you have to do. Watch it, show it to a couple peeps, revise, perfect, etc. I know you're probably like "oh, this fuckin' guy"
But honestly. Do it, You have quite a following here, and those people are involved in a type of community that can take things to cult like status. I'm not trying to be scary, but i mean, an underground powerful voice of reason will work, in regards to good (or terrible) film making.
To articulate and have something well put together (kinda going with the youtube idea) you could do some damage.
So, to answer one of you first questions. There is no specific place that an idea dies on the internet. The internet enables things to last a very long time. You have to make something first before you can get ripped off. It's not difficult to avoid that situation all together either, you can print out the forms online and fill them out yourself.
JUST DO!