The Circus (1928)

Genre is an interesting thing. There are very often blurred lines separating works into genre classifications. The more closely you examine any work the more difficult it becomes to lock it down to a specific genre. Very often this distinction comes down to a wishy-washy "I know it when I see it approach".

The Pawnshop and A Dog's Life

When you go back far enough into the history of popular art you reach a point where works get increasingly hard to talk about due to the almost alien cultural context within which they were created and initially seen. This is not to say that art can't be timeless, many paintings, music, books etc... are received in much the same way now as they were when they were created, but many popluar works lose or change their meaning over time and this can be alienating. This is very evident when viewing the cinema of the early 20th century today. The tools filmmakers had to work with were more restrictive and that certainly does have an alienating effect, but there were also vastly different cultural expectations as to what moving pictures were expected to accomplish.

Beginnings of Cinema: 4 Silent films

This week is going to be the start of a somewhat new direction for this blog. I've been having some difficulty coming up with topics twice a week, and this hobby of mine isn't actually encouraging me to see movies I haven't seen or to reconsider movies I have seen. So what I need is some kind of guiding structure to guide my topics and push me to more interesting things, and I think I have just the thing.