Some Sights & Sounds
On my enduring love of lists and the impossible honor of shaping the film canon.
Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karbanová, Daisies, The Criterion Channel
I love pop culture lists. When I was a kid, I would hand-write lists of the Neopets merch I owned or the I Spy books I had read. A few years later, I spent hours transcribing rankings from back issues of Entertainment Weekly on Wordpad since I didn’t have the high-speed internet needed to find out that digital versions already existed. Most recently, I got really into making individual Letterboxd watchlists for every single streaming service I have, which I obsessively updated every month. While plenty of my colleagues use the movie-logging website Letterboxd as a place to post reviews and make watchlists that are meant to be shared, my profile is a strange assemblage of sometimes nearly identical personal checklists that I doubt make much sense to anyone who doesn’t live inside my brain.
One of many typed watchlists I made in early high school. Sorry to the shows Surface and Flashforward, which did not stand the test of time.
During periods of anxiety, making and checking off lists quiets my mind and makes me feel more in control. Aggregating information has also always felt, to me, like one of the best ways to take my pop cultural education into my own hands. When I was in junior high and high school, I didn’t know many classic film and TV lovers, and the only snippet of film history available to me came via my 10th grade honors English class, when my teacher snuck in screenings of movies like Metropolis and Rebel Without A Cause just before summer break. I may not have grown up with the resources to match my own craving for artistic enrichment, but like any burgeoning film geek with access to a library card and the internet, I had lists.
