A wonderful year full of incredible cinematic experiences. It’s impossible to pick favorites, so I’ll just say that I’m happiest that I saw films from several new countries and directors this year.

ARIK DEVENS


2015

I’m trying something new; I’m writing a recap for the year gone by. In addition to watching these films I also collect them, and in that vein I love finding new ways to quantify things. I thought it might be interesting to look at some data for this site over the last year. I started doing this at the beginning of 2014, so this ends my second full year. While I was certainly slower than last year, I still managed to make a nice dent in my journey.

This year I wrote 51 entries about 84 films. I watched each film before writing about it, for a total of 6,544 minutes, or 109 hours spent enjoying the history of cinema. Of those films I’d only seen 4 before I started this project, meaning that 95% of what I watched was new to me.

My average rating was a 4. My most common rating was a 5, which was given to 32 of the 84 films. My lowest rated film of the year was part of the A Hollis Frampton Odyssey set, with a rating of 1. I gave no rating to The Great Dictator because I felt torn between the quality of the film and my conflicted feelings about it.

Ratings Bar Chart Ratings Spread

I watched films from 13 countries, in 16 languages. The most common country was the United States, followed by Japan, France, and the United Kingdom. The most common language by far was therefore English.

Countries Pie Chart Countries

The oldest film I watched was The Phantom Carriage from 1921. The most recent film was Pina from 2011. The most common decade was the 1960s, and I watched no films from the 2000s.

Decades Pie Chart Decades

Vampyr and M featured the narrowest aspect ratio I saw this year at 1.19:1. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World had the widest at 2.76:1. The most commonly used ratio, 48 of the 84 films, was 1.33:1, otherwise known as standard 4:3.

Aspect Ratios Pie Chart Aspect Ratios

I wrote 42,434 words this year, for an average entry length of 832 words. My longest entry was 2357 words about Les Blank: Always for Pleasure. My shortest was 552 words about Branded to Kill. The most essays I posted in one week was 3, and the most common day by far that I posted on was Saturday.

Days Bar Chart Days

I participated in four Blogathons this year. I hope to participate in at least that many next year. I’ve found that it’s a wonderful way to force myself to write, and also to be encouraged to choose a film that I might otherwise be avoiding. Every film I wrote about for a Blogathon got a 5 rating. All four films were made before 1950. Two were from Germany, and two were from the United States.

M Make Way for Tomorrow Heaven Can Wait Pandora’s Box

I started my own podcast this year, where I force my friends to watch the films I write about here, and watch whatever they want in exchange. I also appeared on the awesome CriterionCast podcast, discussing the Criterion releases of 2015.

Cinema Gadfly CriterionCast

I was also lucky enough to get to see The Third Man, and The Apu Trilogy in their theatrical re-releases. All in all, this was a phenomenal year, and I had a blast doing this. Hopefully 2016 will be even better, thanks to everyone for reading!