Welcome, anyone!

Welcome, anyone, to Unsequence Cinema. I suppose my first post on this new blog site should be a short explanation of who I am, what this is, and more importantly why it is what I hope it is, or why it will be what I hope to make it.

My old neglected music blog

Who I am: a person called Dave. What this is: a place I can write about films I've seen. Why this is: demands a longer answer. I used to occasionally update a blogspot page called Argue With Silence, which began as a site about various forms of underground music before I got a bit bored with it and started adding all sorts of vaguely diverting nonsense about antique books and food festivals and my own inability to find the motivation to post regularly. When I started the entries in late 2007, it was under the assumption that underground music was "my life", and so it should thereby provide me with ample ideas and subjects, and endless inspiration. Unfortunately I was wrong. I have since become aware that I make a lousy music journalist, even a lousy music blogger, and standards are notoriously low where the latter is concerned. I became convinced that, while plenty of readers may have found certain individual subjects interesting, I was the only person who saw any sense in the seemingly random nature of the blog's total content. To call Argue With Silence the musical equivalent of a word association exercise would be to overestimate its thematic unity. It had none.

My local cinema, the wonderful Duke's on Preston Circus, Brighton.

And here I am embarking on a film blog with similarly disconnected content - hence its name, Unsequence Cinema. The only reason I do this is because I don't watch films by theme or genre - I watch them as they take my fancy. But I think this blog may succeed where the other failed. My reasons for hoping this are long and convoluted and as yet unformulated on paper (don't worry, I'll spare you), but it ultimately comes down to the relative ubiquity of storytelling techniques, visual techniques and film language, and the (often unacknowledged) familiarity most film-watching people have with these things, compared with their rough equivalents in music. If I were to start talking at length here about a particular Drowningman or Lungfish record I liked, you would need to have at least a passing familiarity with 90s American post-hardcore music to anchor my words anywhere meaningful in your own experience. But if I were to instead recommend an equally obscure (but much more 'canonical') old Eastern European satire movie*, you would at least expect to understand the way the story I describe might be told in pictures. (Screenshots are helpful as a visual aid; one can hardly expect album covers or waveforms to have the same engaging effect on a reader.) Also, when we talk about movies as opposed to music, we often have the advantage of a narrative line to use as a hook for drawing in the listener. Music doesn't have a storyline on its own, so if we can't directly play the music to people then we resort to gesticulating desperately about its "vibe" or the atmosphere it creates, and often failing to convey it. Because the vast majority of films are narrative films, we aren't forced to do the same when enthusiastically recommending a movie. And so, by the miracle of restrictive cinematic convention, we are rarely if ever forced to overhear a pub movie conversation open with a gambit like "I saw a film the other day with the most fabulous mise en scène!" Thank fuck.

This brings me quite neatly to the issue of 'critical language' and technical terms. I won't be using very much of this stuff. I'm not a film critic, and my time as a film student lasted one screening and one seminar before I switched to a straight English Literature degree (of which I'm going into my second year of very soon). I would likely misuse a lot of terms anyway, and I don't want to start pretentiously overreaching with my entries to Unsequence Cinema. The point of this blog page is to flesh out my thoughts on a number of quite unrelated movies, with a bit of background information thrown in and some lovely screenshots of anything I find particularly striking. And most importantly, Unsequence Cinema is here to recommend movies to people who might not have come across them before. Ultimately, I think the filmgoing public at large is probably a lot better equipped and more receptive to slightly unusual movies than most gig-goers are to unusual music. Audiences naturally try to piece a film together, to work out what the filmmakers are getting at, and this tendency lends itself to going a little outside of one's confort zone. Having said that, I have no great allegience to "weird" movies and Unsequence Cinema will certainly not be weighted in their favour.

I will try to occupy the position of an over-interested punter throughout, instead of a scholar, (which I am not) or a snob (which I really hope I'm not). I acknowledge that film debates are unavoidable as soon as one makes one's opinion known, and I try to avoid them if they are particularly facile or, on the other end of the spectrum, oblique or esoteric. What I'm trying to say is: there will be holes in these reviews if you look hard enough. I don't want to resort to essay language, and I'm not offering my views up as watertight. This is not a thesis.

Well, now the obligatory introduction is over, the movies....

* For some reason I was thinking here of Milos Forman's 1967 comedy 'The Fireman's Ball', banned by the Czech government for being a bit subversive. You'd never notice.