Why am I doing this? - Part Deux
In my last post, I explained how, back in early 2017, I came up with the idea to, each month, watch films from a particular year. I began by watching films from 1990 in March 2017, following up with 1991 in April 2017, 1992 in May, 1993 in June. In December, I ended the year by watching films from 1999. This technique of limiting the choice of films I could watch meant that I'd rediscover classics from my childhood, and discover movies I'd never watched before. Some films were amazing, other not much so. I particularly remember a film called Bulletproof which I really couldn't make sense of. But, the experience of going through the decade via the medium of film was brilliant.
I decided that I'd continue onwards in 2018. For that year, I'd watch films from 2000 to 2009. As this period covers ten years, I'd only need ten months so I'd begin watching them from March, as I had done with the 1990s films in 2017. During my hiatus in January and February, I went through a Star Wars marathon again, watching one movie from the series each weekend. In March 2018, I resumed my project. The first film I watched from the year 2000 was Road Trip. I don't think I ever watched that on its original release. I did watch the American Pie films and enjoyed them back in their day. Road Trip was of a similar ilk, but it just passed me by somehow. It was ok I guess.
Other films I watched from 2000 included Scary Movie, The Patriot (Mel Gibson really doesn't like the English, does he? First Braveheart, then The Patriot), Kevin and Perry Go Large with a soundtrack that truly defines the time, and Vertical Limit. April 2017 was for movies from 2001. It included Black Hawk Down, A Beautiful Mind, Shrek (how is that film so old already?), and The Sweetest Thing. I don't remember much about that film, but I'm sure it had something about shoes in it. May was 2002 and June was 2003.
A Detour of Ice and Fire
But, something happened in June. I only watched two films: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and American Pie: The Wedding. The reason? I discovered Game of Thrones. Yep, about half a decade after the rest of the world, I finally decided to find out what everybody was obsessed with. This was especially because its final season was due to air the following year. I wanted to get up to speed so I could enjoy its swansong with everybody else. Oh, the naivety of thinking we'd actually enjoy its final season, when the reality was anything but.
Anyway, my mission to get through all of Game of Thrones meant that I didn't have time to watch my movies of the 2000s. And, if I'm honest, I think I'd got a little bored by then too. Maybe the films of the early 2000s weren't particularly amazing. I seem to recall it was also a time of franchises - Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean. You'd either have to commit to watching all of them, or at least the first one from each franchise. You couldn't just dip in and out at random. At the time Harry Potter wasn't available on any streaming service, and I remember falling asleep during the first Lord of the Rings film. I didn't feel in the mood for Pirates of the Caribbean.
By the time I'd completed Game of Thrones, it was late August. I decided I would resume watching the films of the 2000s, returning to 2003 in September 2018. And other films I watched from 2003 included The Core (I quite enjoyed that!), Girl with a Pearl Earring, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. I actually found myself back in the swing of things. 2004 followed in October, 2005 in November, 2006 in December 2018. But, what next?
Well, I figured that, instead of taking my usual break in January and February 2019, I'd just carry on. So, in January 2019, I watched films from 2007, February was 2008, and so on. I continued consecutively until I got to December 2019, when I watched the films of 2018. Yep, these were films from just the previous year, which interestingly were films that hadn't even been released when I started my "project" in 2017. My final film was Solo: A Star Wars Story chosen because the reason I started all of this was because of Star Wars.
By then, I was pretty much up to date. Continue onwards, and I'd end up watching films from the future. The only remaining year was 2019. I figured that I could watch films from 2019 in January 2020. However, during the year 2019 itself, I had watched some 2019 films at the cinema. And it still felt that they were current films. They were also harder to access as many were not yet available on any streaming services. Remember 2019 was pre-Disney Plus, and, perhaps more importantly, pre-pandemic. At that point, films didn't go so quickly to streaming platforms. In the UK, Sky TV, and their Now TV streaming service, tended to get the most recent, and they would usually be 6 to 12 months after their cinema release.
So, what should I do next? I felt like I wanted to continue with a similar technique, and considered a variety of options. One option was to repeat the project again. Go back to 1990 and fill in the gaps of films I didn't watch during my first run through the year. Another was to dedicate 2020 to the 1980s. I was a child in the 1980s, and the decade featured a lot of the films I remember watching, or was aware of, at the time. It's also regarded as a particularly strong decade for movies, at least for mainstream films with wide appeal. But, what about the 1970s? What about Jaws, The Godfather, some of the James Bond films. But James Bond films began in the 1960s. Why don't I go back to the 1960s? I began browsing the catalogues of streaming services to see which films they had available from the 1960s, and was surprised by not only the quantity available, but also by the number that I'd heard of but had never watched. I use an app called JustWatch for this. I decided to see how far back I could realistically go. And this led me to doing some research into film history.
A Brief History of Film
What I realised is that I didn't know the film industry actually began. What were the first movies? When did films start featuring sound? What about colour? Do the earliest films still exist? I will talk more specific areas of film history in other entries, but what I roughly discovered is that the first movies, or "moving pictures" were produced from the late 1880s. They were usually only a few seconds long, and were particularly low on action and plot. 1888's Roundhay Garden Scene featured some Victorian folk walking around a garden in Yorkshire. I'd give it 2 stars. There was a film called Man Walking Around a Corner from the previous year, but that was just a series of photographs played one after the other. It featured a man walking around a corner.
Whereas early films were just footage of people doing people things, towards the end of the decade, they began being used as a means of telling stories. Yep, they featured actors, sets, a plot, directors, and even special effects. All the things that films today have. No CGI though. It was all done with clever camera techniques. And string.
Around the turn of the century, films like Cinderella (1899) and A Trip to the Moon (1902) found their way onto celluloid, both of which were produced by French film pioneer, Georges Méliès. It also brought about the start of film piracy. And copyright claims when filmmakers would turn any story they liked into a movie. An early version of Ben-Hur from 1907 was the first to be accused of infringing copyright.
Films gradually got longer, with 1915's controversial The Birth of a Nation running for around three hours. They also remained silent. That was until 1927 when Al Jolson astounded film audiences by actually speaking and singing in The Jazz Singer. From then on, talkies, or talking pictures, rapidly became the norm. Colour had been experimented with since the birth of film itself (usually by actually hand-painting the film prints themselves, or by adding tinting onto them), but movies made in colour began in the 1930s, although the industry stayed mostly black and white until at least the early sixties.
My little tour through film history convinced me that I'd like to at least try to start at the beginning. If I got bored, I'd try something else. But, it was worth a go. If we class 1900 as a starting point of films that could be classed as actual films, and not just filmed footage, I'd start there. But I didn't fancy the idea of watching films from 1900 in one month, 1901 the following month, 1902 the month after that. So, I decided that, for the first month of 2020, I'd pick out random films from 1900 to 1919. This included A Trip to the Moon, Ben-Hur and Birth of a Nation as well as The Great Train Robbery (1903), A Tale of Two Cities (1911), and Tarzan of the Apes (1918). In February 2020, I'd watch one film from every year of the 1920s. And, I have to say, I found myself enjoying films from that period much more than I expected. There was The Mark of Zorro from 1920, Charlie Chaplin's The Kid from 1921, Robin Hood from 1922, Safety Last from 1923, which features the famous scene of Harold Lloyd dangling from a skyscraper by holding onto the hand of its clock, He Who Gets Slapped from 1924 (very strange film!), Battleship Potemkin from 1925, Buster Keaton's The General from 1926, His First Flame from 1927 (one scene in that film had me in stitches), Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie plus The Finishing Touch from 1928. And finishing with a musical talkie from 1929, The Broadway Melody.
Back to the Past
And then, we entered March 2020. That's when I began my Century of Cinema project. Although I didn't call it that back then. I decided that I would now begin, as before, with one year for each month, starting with 1930. 1929's The Broadway Melody, despite being a bit rubbish, was a good transition into 1930. It took me from the silent era into the talkies, and by 1930, pretty much every film featured people speaking. Not always very well, but words could flow from mouths, and music could be part of the soundtrack. From 1930, I watched the war film Hell's Angels, the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, melodramatic romantic comedy Sin Takes a Holiday, the musical Whoopee!, and prison film The Big House. April 2020 would feature films from 1931, the year in which Dracula and Frankenstein brought the scares, while the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business and Charlie Chaplin in City Lights brought the laughter and tears. And, that is how things would continue. If things went to plan, and another Game of Thrones didn't throw me off track, I'd end 2020 in 1939. I'd watch the 1940s in 2021, the 1950s in 2022, 1960s in 2023, 1970s in 2024, 1980s in 2025. And by 2026, I'd be back to where I began - in 1990. 2027 would be 2000s, 2028 would be the 2010s. And 2029 would be the 2020s, beginning with 2020, and ending in that very year, 2029. And, by some sort of mathematical fluke, that would actually equate to exactly 100 years of movies - 1930 to 2029. Or, in other words, a Century of Cinema!
Phew! That was a long entry!!! Well, I'm not editing it now.