Welcome to Kinoblog, intended as a repository for things that I dig up in my ongoing research into central and eastern European cinema that I haven’t managed to turn into professional commissions. In fact, they’ll often be by-products of background research for interviews and overviews where I have to gloss over individual titles in a few dozen words (if that).
It’s built on foundations laid by two earlier, somewhat over-specialised blogs – FilmJournal’s Closely Watched DVDs and an unpublished earlier effort from 2004 (also called Kinoblog), and I’ll be porting all the pieces I wrote for them over here in due course. The problem I had with them was that their focus (on Czech and Soviet cinema, respectively) was too narrow, and I was watching loads of great films, especially from Hungary, Poland and the former Yugoslavia, that didn’t fit the template. Also, I was insanely over-zealous when it came to things like credits and links, meaning that near-complete pieces would be bogged down in fact-checking and formatting hell when there was no particularly good reason not to publish them.
So hopefully it’s third time lucky – and this time, I’ll be mixing more formal reviews with instant snapshots of whatever I happen to be watching, so updates should be a lot more frequent than they’ve been in the past. As you’ll see from the list of pieces I’ve written for Sight & Sound magazine over the past five years, my current viewing is overwhelmingly biased towards Central and Eastern European cinema – and although this is doubtless partly self-fulfilling (since I’ve written the majority of pieces about the region’s cinema in the last few years, I tend to get first refusal on future commissions), there’s little doubt that a large and increasing part of my regular film diet is from that part of the world, helped enormously by the surprisingly large number of DVD releases with English subtitles.
So why ‘Kinoblog’? Well, ‘Kino’ means ‘cinema’ in most of the region’s languages, including Czech, Polish, Russian and the various languages of the former Yugoslavia (Hungarian is the major exception, but that’s always been a law unto itself), so it seemed appropriate.