Year in Views

2024

2024 was kinda rough. Overall, I think I watched less stuff than I normally would, which makes sense considering how stressful the year was. I definitely craved the outdoors more than being cooped up inside, and generally just found it harder to dedicate time to uninterrupted viewing, especially feature-length titles.

basic highlights

by format (shorts vs. feature-length)

a circle graph showing roughly 53% shorts and 47% features

This result is pretty unsurprising considering how time-constrained I felt this year, but also reflects an intentional commitment to seek out short experimental work online. More on that discussed in the by venue section.

by century

a circle graph showing roughly 70% in the 21st century and 30% in the 20th

This outcome trending more toward 21st century titles came as a bit of surprise but makes sense considering the aforementioned intention to seek out experimental work online, which (for me) definitely tends to skew more contemporary than repertory.

I wonder how this would have looked 10 years ago when I was working as a projectionist in a film archive running nitrate and 35mm film 6 nights a week.

by year

Apologies for the sprawl of the graph shown below. It’s difficult to visualize 91 years of viewing range.

Here we see the strongest concentration of titles in 2023 and 2024 that further reflects a bias toward the contemporary for this year.

a bar graph showing a concentration of titles in 2022-2024

We can rein this in a bit by grouping into decades.

a bar graph showing a concentration of titles from the 1990s to 2020s

And get further insight by breaking each decade down by shorts and features.

a stacked bar graph displaying shorts and features data by decade

It isn’t super surprising that features edged out shorts in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. But that fact that only one 80s short made it in at all seems a little odd. That one was From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services No. 1 by the great German filmmaker Helke Sander.

This is also a good reminder to not conflate quantity with quality for any given set of viewing experiences. There were plenty of older shorts that absolutely blew me away that I otherwise would not have had a chance to see if it wasn’t for festivals providing a streaming options (e.g. Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and Pat O’Neil’s Down Wind (1973) at Media City Film Festival) and specialty platforms putting stuff out there (e.g. Craig Baldwin’s Stolen Movie (1968) via Canyon Cinema and Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street via PARACME).

by venue

a bar graph showing different venues for viewing, with Criterion Channel and Mubi being the most frequently used

Looking at this data about where/how I am watching stuff seems pretty revealing. Obviously, I’m favoring a few streaming services–Criterion Channel and Mubi, namely–as these two represent about 28% (n=92) of everything I’ve watched this year.

Sadly, I only watched about 10% (n=33) of titles in an actual theater, although some of those–e.g. the new restoration of Paris, Texas (1984) in an IMAX auditorium during the Tallahassee Film Festival; seeing The Substance (2024) with a packed, very vocal house–were pretty amazing all the same.

a bar graph showing different venues for viewing shorts, with Canyon Cinema Vimeo and Animatter streaming being the most frequently used

I definitely took advantage of all the time-limited titles Canyon Cinema made available, in addition to leaning hard into streaming options provided by film festivals when I could.

I don’t really have a lot of access to traditional, in-person venues for this where I currently live (e.g. microcinemas, galleries, etc), so the fact that places like Antimatter, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Media City Film Festival, in addition to temporary and patron-driven offerings via places like e-flux and the Canyon Cinema On-Demand, are providing streaming options is really amazing.

This is a lot of extra work for organizations that are already stretched pretty thin, for sure, but folks like me are hugely appreciative of these efforts and I try to support the festivals in other ways (e.g. donations, buying merch) whenever possible.

Hitting up individual artist Vimeo pages and specialty platforms like PARACME also gave me plenty of opportunities to deep dive and rabbit-hole in the interest of research/inspiration/nerding out (e.g. Andrew Kim, Bill Brown, Mary Ellen Bute).

a bar graph showing different venues for viewing features, with Criterion Channel and Movie Night being the most frequently used

Zooming into just the features, clearly I have a preference for plunging into the depths of Criterion Channel and Mubi (see next section for more on these platforms, specifically). There’s some other funny one-off’s, here, like watching Mommie Dearest (1981) at my friends’ vegetarian restaurant and “fine dive bar,” The Bark, and Footprints on the Moon (1975) via Shudder, a service I’ve never really looked into (perhaps to my own detriment).

A note on “Movie Night” - every Tuesday night a group of us get together to watch a feature (and the occasional short). We rotate who selects the film each week, and the only criteria it needs to meet is that no one (not even the person choosing it) can have seen it already. This proves to be challenging some times as there are eight of us and we’re a mixture of nerds/filmmakers/cinephiles/all of the above.

But, when we break through, it usually yields some great results. I saw three of my favorite films from 2024* because of Movie Night, and generally it gives me an opportunity to see stuff I probably wouldn’t otherwise. All to say, this is a highly recommended thing you might want to do with your friends as well.

*The Last Year of Darkness (Ben Mullinkosson), Queendom (Agniia Galdanova), Leonor Will Never Die (Martika Ramierz Escobar)

criterion channel + mubi by year

a circle graph showing viewing range for Criterion Channel, which shows an even distribution between 1933-2024

a circle graph showing viewing range for Mubi, which shows a concentration of titles in the 2020s

I was also curious about how I “treated” Criterion Channel and Mubi, respectively, in terms of what I watched from different years/historical eras. From looking at the data, it’s clear I watched a much broader range of titles on Criterion, which spanned from 1933 to 2024.

Compare this to Mubi, where the oldest title is 1970. In the Criterion data we can also see a much more even distribution in the range, whereas with Mubi about 52% of the titles come from the 2020s and only 17.5% comes from the 20th century.

Broadly, I think it’s pretty clear that I’m relying on Criterion for a lot more repertory viewing and Mubi for contemporary stuff. This is not at all surprising considering the curatorial focus of each platform.

by filmmaker

a bar graph showing all filmmakers with more than 1 title view

Of the 281 filmmakers whose work I saw this year, I watched more than 1 title from only 29 of them. Bill Brown racked up the most with 16, with Rose Lowder and Lawrence Jordan each racking up 10.

conclusions/resolutions

  1. Conclusion: Film festivals offering streaming options are incredibly valuable to me, but I worry about the sustainability of it in increasingly austere times.

  2. Resolution: Go see more movies in-person. I worked in theaters for years and it’s just dumb/lazy that I don’t make the effort to support them more proactively.

  3. Resolution: Stay on top of time-limited releases on platforms like e-flux, LUX, etc. more effectively. I can’t count how many times I’ve kicked myself for missing out on this kind of thing.

top picks from 2024

Presented alphabetically and unconfined by sequential ranking and pre-determined list size as such restrictions are arbitrary and boring.

shorts

features

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