From Jonathan Rosenbaum’s latest:
All of this stuff is available to anyone with access to the Internet, which is as much a part of this adventure as DVD technology itself. Film buffs around the world, many of them still in their 20s, are swapping information and educating one another about this unprecedented bounty via blogs and chat groups. All this is amplifying and intensifying grassroots, word-of-mouth communication in a way that threatens to forever alter the power bases that influence cultural matters. Because you no longer have to live in Paris, New York, or Chicago in order to find out who Feuillade was or why he’s so great — and because a “movie” like Outfoxed no longer has to open at a theater or even exist on celluloid in order to have a sizable social impact.
And along those lines, I’m pleased to announce Cine Club, a new group blog that I hope will evolve in interesting ways. In the spirit of Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, I recently began hosting weekly film viewings with a small group of friends. As much as I enjoy watching films alone, something of the cinema’s communal experience is lost when we do that. Our cine club and the blog are an experiment of sorts — an attempt to use technology (projectors, DVDs, online publishing) to discover great films and to recapture that community.
For now, only a few of us are participating in the blog. Keep an eye on it for further developments.