Five Years Ago...(adiós)

Birthday time again

    The blog's birthday always seems to catch me unawares - for some reason I remember it as starting later in the month than it did. Anyway, that's my excuse for not having a special post ready for Nobody Knows Anybody's fourth birthday. 

    So what happened in 2014? There were ups and downs, but overall it was a marked improvement on 2013.  

    In the negative column, I'm still in the same job as I was this time last year. Staff morale has continued in steady decline since the restructure in 2013 but has noticeably nosedived even further in the last six months. The smallish team (14 of us) I'm in moved to an open plan basement office (with approx. 55 people in there) in the summer and I've discovered that I don't much like spending my entire day underground with strip lighting and in such close proximity to other people that there is no middle distance to gaze into. I know that a decline in working conditions / environment seems to be being rolled out worldwide, with the Powers That Be apparently in a race to the bottom in terms of how they treat their workforce - and I know that many others have it far worse than me [plus, y'know, a job is a job *repeats ad infinitum*] - but it makes going to work more of a grind than it needs to be. In an effort to see more sky, towards the end of the year I started walking to and from work (about 3 miles) - at the moment I mainly see night sky, but I figure that if I can stick with it during the cold and dark, then the warm (ha!) and light should be a doddle.
    Anyway, it was a combination of the ongoing crappy working conditions and my being tied to home outside of working hours (a family member had multiple surgeries) during 2013 that made me determined to do more of the things I enjoy, but also to get out and about more in 2014. 
    Film festivals combined both of those things. I started off small with a daytrip to Manchester in March to catch a double bill at the 20th Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival, and I also saw several documentaries in the same month as part of the AV Festival in my home city (Newcastle). Then I found out that three of the 'otro cine español' titles I was investigating were screening at Bradford International Film Festival (April), so I headed off there (I wrote about those films for Mediático - Costa da Morte ended up being my favourite film of the year). Three days in Edinburgh (June) followed, another three in Berwick (September), a 24-hr return to Edinburgh for the inaugural Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival in October, and finally four days in Leeds (November). Although Spanish films featured at most (but not all) of those festivals, as I said in my birthday post last year I wanted to broaden the range of films I was watching, so the Spanish titles were not necessarily the main reason for attending a given festival. I'm no better at negotiating large groups of people I don't know in a festival context than I am in a conference setting, and I didn't explore places as much as I should have, but I saw some good films - many of which I might not get the chance to see anywhere else. I'll be continuing with my film-seeking travels in 2015 and will hopefully also head beyond the UK at some point this year as well.
    The other thing that I said that I wanted to do in 2014 was consider other forms / arenas of publication. That's something I'm still working on (I think I need to broaden the scope of what I write about before I approach some of the publications I've been thinking of), but I considerably upped the amount of writing I was doing last year, which was a challenge given that I work full-time but I think that my writing improved through more consistent application and effort. The much-mentioned (by me) Javier Bardem article morphed into something else entirely, but it was published as part of The Cine-Files special issue on acting. I wrote two short 'Lost Classics' pieces for The Big Picture Magazine website (the first on Entre tinieblas (Pedro Almodóvar, 1983), the second on Overlord (Stuart Cooper, 1975)) and two articles for Mediático (the already-mentioned one about the Spanish films at BIFF, and one on censorship and Spanish documentary - the latter being the piece of writing I was happiest with last year). But the main part of my new output has been reviews, primarily for Eye for Film (45 reviews) and a handful for Take One (7 reviews). Writing reviews has allowed me to write about non-Spanish films for the first time in years - and I wrote at least one review for each festival I attended (around 30 of the Eye for Film reviews are for Spanish films - mainly because I covered the London Spanish Film Festival in September (from the comfort of my own home because a lot of the films were available on DVD or VOD) and the Spanish retrospectives at Leeds - ordinarily I don't think I would see so many Spanish films on the festival circuit in one year).

    As I trundle on into the fifth year of writing this blog my plans are not much changed from those of a year ago. My 2014 project of researching this ever-mutating 'otro cine español' continues, although I am much more focused on documentaries than I was at the start, and I have also been watching a variety of (non-Spanish) documentaries for a broader context. Hopefully I'll reach a point this year where I work out exactly what the nub of what I'm going after in this research is and what shape the writing needs to take. The Carlos Saura Challenge has (finally) restarted and I'll be trying to keep momentum going with that - I need to watch at least two of them a month to be in with a hope of finishing the challenge this year, so we'll see how I go. I'll be going to more festivals and writing more reviews, but also thinking about different ways to write about both festivals and the films I see there. I'd like to learn how to make a video essay. And I think I should aim to write something in Spanish. Maybe. I've currently got a backlog of viewing unrelated to the blog, so I need to work through that during the next couple of weeks - but after that I hope to fall back into a regular pattern of writing on here too.

Belated Birthday

My favourite of the Spanish films I've seen in the last twelve months, Atraco a las tres / [Bank Robbery at Three O'Clock] (José María Forqué, 1962)

     An email telling me that the Nobody Knows Anybody twitter account had turned three alerted me to the fact that I had forgotten the blog’s birthday (on Thursday 6th). Caught up in other things, it had passed me by; I have entered the fourth year of this blog’s existence in much the same way as I conducted the third one.
     2013 was not a brilliant year for me. There were some positives: I finally managed to get a full-time job, after years of being stuck in part-time employment; I delivered a paper at an academic conference for the first time in more than five years; I started going to the cinema again, after a couple of years of not really bothering (a combination of it being too expensive to be a regular habit and an increasingly ‘meh’ attitude to life in general and recent cinema in particular – La grande bellezza shook me out of the meh-ness (I saw it three times on the big screen), and full-time hours mean that I can now afford to go more often); and people started writing guest posts for the blog (which is exciting for me and something I really appreciate – so, thank you Fiona Noble, Michael Pattison, and Rowena Santos Aquino). But the negatives were at times overwhelming: three weeks after I started the job, the institution I work for announced a full restructure and I (along with all of my colleagues) had to reapply and be re-interviewed for a reduced number of jobs (I hung on to my job, but the process took a couple of months and the aftermath of redundancies and reassignments, and the general feeling that good people have been messed around, was horrible and still lingers six months later); and a member of my immediate family was in hospital for surgery on three separate occasions (the last just before Christmas), which has been stressful and emotionally draining.

So, bring on 2014!

      Certain things were also clarified for me. I enjoyed the conference, which surprised me because I’ve not had good experiences with academic conferences in the past (in my experience they seem to attract people who need to make others feel small in order to make themselves feel big –a lot of unnecessary point scoring– but on this occasion everyone was lovely) and having listened to so many people researching one of my main areas of interest (but in a variety of different contexts), I left feeling that my spark of enthusiasm had been reignited. However you’ll note that I said ‘listened to’ rather than ‘spoken to’; I find navigating large groups of people I don’t know to be a bit of an anxiety generator, and it sometimes brings out my shyness to an incapacitating degree. I’m fine in small groups, or one-to-one, but I avoid large gatherings if possible. But I felt I had to go, and that I had to submit a paper, if only to prove to myself that I could and that my brain was still capable of functioning in that way. So I went. But I also know that that probably isn’t the forum I would choose to put myself into again anytime soon. What it also clarified is that I don’t think that ‘academia’ is what I’m aiming for; I want to write about films but not necessarily in that way. That’s not to say that I won’t write something up as an article and submit it to an academic journal if I have an idea that suits that setting, but I’m not setting out for an academic publications profile. The purpose of creating and sustaining a list of (academic) publications is usually to acquire an academic position / footing, and I don’t want to be ‘an academic’. But I also think that there are different (and more immediate) ways to share information, ideas, and arguments about films (from my personal perspective, Mediático and Modern Languages Open are interesting developments in that regard). I realise that whatever form you choose to work or publish in, there are hoops to be gone through, but I find that I am quite picky about which hoops I will choose to jump through. At the same time, some ‘requirements’ don’t seem like hoops at all because they’re part-and-parcel of something you enjoy doing and how you view the world. But I'm more interested in textual analysis than theoretical frameworks, and I'm currently trying to find my voice with that focus. 
      I have made a start with considering different forms / arenas of publication, but I won’t mention particulars unless / until I have something concrete. That said, I have ‘signed up’ (and am looking forward) to contributing to Mediático (initial topic still to be decided), a new blog focussing on Latin American, Latino/a, and Iberian media and film studies (find them on twitter @MediaticoMFM). In terms of what I write about, I’ve come to a number of conclusions in the past year: the blog is really helpful for working through ideas because I think by writing, and something larger can be approached piecemeal and without pressure to be ’perfect’, and it can be returned to as and when I'm ready, so that over time I can hone my thinking and can see the shape that the argument or discussion needs to take (a case in point is the Javier Bardem ‘issue’ I kept returning to, which has now turned into something else entirely and which I have submitted for consideration at an online (open access) journal); I should draw a line under some of the topics that were the basis of my PhD and look at other things; I need to be more focussed because the ‘random viewing’ thread, although it does reflect my viewing habits most of the time, does not allow me to be consistent or coherent in thinking things through; I don’t need to write about every Spanish film I watch (this relates to the previous point, but sometimes I just don’t have anything to say about a particular film and at that point I should just move on); in order to improve and expand my writing, I should write about cinema more broadly (i.e. not just that which originates from Spain). 
     So, the blog will continue but with a few changes. One element of my PhD research that I haven’t done much with is the industrial component, which I think is currently an interesting topic because the Spanish film industry has been generally imploding for at least the past 12-18 months. An offshoot of that has been the development of what is being referred to (by Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, at least) as ‘El otro cine español’ and the general trend for ‘cine low cost’ and initiatives and / or platforms such as #littlesecretfilm and Márgenes. I’m intending to mainly focus on these topics (and how they interrelate; not everyone thinks that the low cost development is good for the future of cinema made in Spain) for the next year, initially by watching a lot of films and getting a sense of what this ‘movement’ (if that is what it is) comprises and what it doesn’t; I will be looking for connections but will probably write about the films individually, or by director, to begin with. But from now on I won’t be writing about every film viewed. I’ll probably post a full list at the end of the year or something like that instead. My Carlos Saura Challenge will restart, hopefully soon, but I’m not going to attempt to give a timetable because I always break from it (but my aim has to be for more than another 6 films in the next twelve months, otherwise it'll take me more than six years to work my way through his filmography). I hope that there will be more guest posts – please tweet me or comment below if you have an idea for a post. It can relate to any aspect of Spanish cinema; starting a dialogue with people was one of my original intentions with the blog. Which brings me to my last point: writing about cinema outside of Spain. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do or how I’m going to do it. In relation to Spanish-language cinema (that isn’t technically 'Spanish’), I may still just post that here (as I did with my Pablo Larraín post), but I have also got a couple of ideas for things that in no way relate to this blog, so I will have to have a think about that. If I argue (as I do) that the emergence of specific actors / stars doesn't happen in a vacuum, that there is an industrial as well as a cultural context to their creation, the same is also true of Spanish cinema(s) more broadly; 'it' (cinema in Spain is not singular) exists within a wider network of events and circumstances and my trips to the cinema in the second half of 2013 highlighted for me that I need to pay attention to that wider context as well. So something non-Spanish should start appearing at some point in 2014 (later in the year, if I’m being realistic).
     Ordinarily by this point in the year I have posted ‘my top 5 of [previous year]’ and ’10 films to look out for in [the current year]’ posts. I’ve decided not to do that this year. My top 5 post would relate to Spanish films from 2013 and 2012 (because I mainly see things on DVD the year after their Spanish release) but I didn’t see enough films from those years in the last twelve months (I saw five, so it would be like just putting them in order of preference rather than actual favourites, and there were at least two of them that I didn’t rate) – between Carlos Saura and Alfredo Landa, I watched a lot of older films last year. In terms of the films coming this year, a couple of the ones I highlighted last year have still yet to be released (generally due to funding falling through) and at least one has stalled in pre-production (the Saura one, obviously), so there didn’t seem much point in attempting another full-blown list. Of the ones outstanding from last year, I am still interested in: Murieron por encima de sus posibilidades (dir. Isaki Lacuesta) and Presentimientos (dir. Santiago Tabernero) (the latter has been released in Spain in the past week or so). Of films that are ‘finished’ or well into production (as far as I can tell) and due for release in 2014, I will keep an eye out for: Magical Girl (dir. Carlos Vermut); La novia (dir. Paula Ortiz); Carmina y amén (dir. Paco León); La isla mínima (dir. Alberto Rodríguez); and El niño (dir. Daniel Monzón).

Two Years Old

This is just a short post to point out that the blog turns two today. Woo-hoo!
   The second year of Nobody Knows Anybody has not been as prolific as its first (mainly due to varying work patterns and commitments), but hopefully the quality has remained, and I'm glad that I've stuck with it. I mentioned in last year's birthday post that the main aim of writing the blog has been for me to kickstart my brain, and that continues. Last year I had some ideas that I was thinking through - they have been put to one side because I completely lost my train of thought when the opportunity of more (paid) hours meant that my research ground to a halt. But I have started to develop a couple of other (different) ideas and took the plunge in submitting an abstract for a conference.....and it was accepted! So now I just need to write the bloody thing! I'll post something about it nearer the time (the conference is in June) and will probably post the paper on here afterwards. I've also got another idea, relating to a particular actor's performances in two films, but that's on the back-burner for the moment until I've got a proper draft of the conference paper. So that's the progress in terms of my brain!
   As I move into the third year of the blog, I'm setting myself a year-long challenge to give a bit more structure to proceedings - a post about that will appear shortly. Other than that, I'll continue in the same vein, although I'd also like to figure out how to write about work in progress without feeling that I'm putting half-thought-out ideas on display. I think that more 'Not-Entirely-Random Viewing' posts might be the answer to that. Posting will continue to be irregular for the foreseeable future, but I'll try to stop mentioning that as I think that as long as I keep going, that side of things doesn't matter too much.
   Anyway, thanks for reading and I look forward to sharing more cinematic discoveries this year.

One Year Ago...

   One year ago today I took a leap into the unknown and started writing Nobody Knows Anybody. Sixty-six films and an Almodóvathon later, here we are.

   I don't know that the blog has turned out quite the way that I envisaged, but it has fulfilled its primary function of getting me writing again and kickstarting my brain. I haven't posted as many in-depth pieces as I originally intended (mainly due to my acquiring a (temporary) second job last September), but the blog has made me re-engage with film and probably also caused me to watch a broader variety of films than may otherwise have been the case. Although the shorter posts (either in the Random Viewing strand or short(ish) considerations of particular films) are likely to be the norm for the time being (my current work commitments last at least until the end of June), in the last few months I have started thinking about ideas for longer, more academic, pieces -thinking is as far as I've got in most instances due to lack of time, but just getting to that stage is a major step forward from where I was this time last year. It's exciting to experience the thrill of having an idea again -and to actually want to think something through and see where I can take it. [Although at the moment there is also an element of frustration due to the combination of my two shift patterns not being particularly conducive to anything that requires sustained thinking] I don't know whether these ideas will pan out, or whether they will end up on here -although some of them have already been mentioned in passing because they relate to things that I've said that I'm going to write that then haven't materialised- but it seems likely that they'll put in an appearance in some way because the ideas have sparked because of things I've watched or read to write about for Nobody Knows Anybody. Either way, writing this blog has been a constructive thing for me to do and I intend to keep it up.

   The other intention with Nobody Knows Anybody was to start a conversation in English about Spanish cinema. I haven't been overly successful on that side of things (although my heartfelt thanks to those of you who have either commented on here or chatted to me on twitter), but I don't feel too downcast about it because I can see that the posts are being read and visitor numbers have been steadily increasing. Someone once told me that a study had revealed that the average journal article takes six months to write and is then read by an average of two people (factor in that one of those is likely to be your mother, and that's not exactly a wide audience) -if I thought I was posting stuff into an abyss, I might feel differently, but that isn't the case. So thanks for stopping by!

   Anyway, this is just a short post to mark Nobody Knows Anybody's first birthday. On a similar theme, I thought that later in the week I might post something about the first Spanish film I ever saw (I'll keep you in suspense as to what it was / is. Clue: it is twenty years old this year).