In September 2021, Talking Pictures TV launched the Cellar Club, a Friday-night horror / SF triple-bill introduced and hosted by Caroline Munro. Usually they start with a good solid classic, followed up by two more films which are - shall we say? - usually more deservedly obscure. For the first three weeks, the top-billed movies were Hammer's Golden Trinity:
The Mummy,
Dracula and
Curse of Frankenstein (working through them in backwards chronological order of production for some reason). Combined with Caroline Munro hosting them, of course I was going to make the effort to watch those live. And, as I could see that lots of my friends were also talking about them excitedly on Twitter, somehow it felt right to live-tweet them during broadcast.
I don't usually live-tweet films. It's not really a great way to watch a film you haven't seen before, because half the time your eyes are on your device rather than the TV, so you miss visual details and quite often plot points too as you write about the last thing which happened. But I gradually realised there was a whole community of people watching and live-tweeting the top-billed Cellar Club film each week, led by the
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TheFilmCrowd account. Soon I was not just tweeting my own thoughts into the void, but engaging with other people's and getting feedback on mine. So, although it's still not how I would watch a film I really wanted to engage with deeply, I've come to consider it a different but fun way of watching in its own right. I've also made a bunch of new Twitter friends that way and really enjoyed interacting with them, including between the live-tweets.
The whole thing has posed a problem for the way I record my film viewing in this journal, though. I've been writing at least something here for every film I've watched since 2007. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it absolutely definitely means I don't watch as many films as I might if I didn't do it, because the 'cost' of watching any film is that I have to write an LJ / DW post about it. Although I tried to set a rule at the beginning that they didn't have to be extensive reviews, and just a record and quick reaction would be fine, that simply isn't what I'm like. I always have a lot of thoughts I want to record, which in turn becomes a burden. On the other hand, though, the knowledge that I'll need to write something down after watching has definitely made me more attentive to what I see, and the regular practice of articulating my thoughts has probably made me a better film critic. I'm pretty sure it's the reason why my Cellar Club live-tweets ended up getting me invited onto a live webcast to discuss Hammer films on Sunday.
But I've been struggling with what to do about the fact that I've been gaily watching all these films, and without yet 'writing up' a single one here. Initially I told myself these views 'didn't count', because I wasn't watching 'properly' (due to looking at my device half the time), and at least initially had seen the films before so had written up 'proper' reviews here on earlier occasions anyway. But increasingly as the Cellar Club moved onto films I hadn't seen before, including some I'd been meaning to watch for a while, that position has become unsatisfactory. And in any case, the very nature of the whole thing means that I do have a written record of each film anyway. That's what the live-tweets are! They just aren't here.
So, all this is by way of saying that I'm now going to perform the rather tedious (probably for both me and my subscribers) task of importing the content of these threads here, so that I can integrate them into the record of my other LJ / DW write-ups. Thankfully, every live-tweet is neatly threaded - something I did in the first place mainly to avoid swamping followers who weren't interested with a barrage of tweets about a movie they weren't watching. So my plan in each case is to link directly to the first tweet in the thread, which will mean I can see them again easily in their original context in future. But I'm also (this is the most tedious bit for me) going to copy and paste the content of each individual thread into the body of an LJ / DW entry, so that I don't
have to go to Twitter for the details, and indeed I have an independent record in case some day Twitter ceases to exist. (More likely for LJ at the moment, but that's why I also use DW.)
Some of the individual tweets won't make sense any more out of context, even to me, but that's the nature of the thing. I reserve the right to quietly correct typos, break hashtags which I don't want LJ to replicate or insert editorial comments where I
can remember the context and want to clarify it, and indeed to include a paragraph of prelude or commentary where I want to say a bit more here than was included in the original thread. It'll take a few entries over a few weeks, so sorry for the spamminess while that's happening. Each thread will always be under a cut anyway, so hopefully not too annoying. And then once I've brought things up to date, I can just keep up the habit on a weekly-or-less-frequent basis, and I'll be back to business as usual but with a better record of my film viewing. Phew!
( 12. The Mummy (1959), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 3 September )( 13. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 10 September )( 14. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 17 September )OK, that wasn't too bad actually. I think I can catch up in this way reasonably quickly. Probably not this week, as I'm going to Oxford on Thursday and need to pack for that tomorrow evening. But judging by this first experiment, it seems feasible and a reasonable compromise for the sake of my record-keeping. Cool.
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