Day 100: adding up the score

adding up the score

I’m looking at my progress, and wondering how I’m going to achieve this 200 Greatest Films (in 52 weeks) if I keep watching more than the two or three best films by all the major directors.

For instance, in the last two weeks I’ve watched six Truffaut films of which only one was on the list. So I’m behind.

But I watched two films by Chris Marker, in one night, which are on the list, so I’ve recovered lost ground.

I know

  • That I’ve got several big events coming up with major films which I’ve separated out of the usual director’s breakdown (like Apocalypse Now [1979] & Raging Bull [1980] & Lawrence of Arabia [1962] and The Good the Bad and the Ugly [1966]).
  • That the films which are dominating my time are the ones from filmmaking countries which I’m not very familiar with, like Sweden, France and Italy. So down the track when I see films I’ve seen many times before it shouldn’t require such an effort to immerse myself in other films of the same period.
  • That I’m grouping (non-English-speaking) films – made in Europe – together, at this point; so I’m getting a lot more information to digest than if I watched consecutive weeks of Alfred Hitchcock films, Billy Wilder films and Orson Welles films.
  • That at some point I’m not going to need to watch various films two or three times to understand what they’re saying or why they’re important.