As I've struggled to get back into writing, and have constantly re-read friends' work for inspiration, I had thought it might be therapeutic to re-read some of my own words, too. Thus, I printed off a forty-page, digest-sized compendium of all the sixty-odd reviews I had submitted to the IMDB in the first half of last decade.
Many of my opinions of the films I reviewed would now likely change- at the very least, I would use different words to voice them. While these pieces are imperfect (many were written on my lunch hours as a way to "stay in shape" between issues of my publication), they however have a clarity (and a muse) that I currently struggle to get back. This lucidity results from my personal identification with the Grade Z genre movies or experimental cinema that comprised most of those reviews.
These kinds of film, universally perceived as low trash and high art (respectively), nonetheless share a commonality: they are works made from hunger. In those days, when it was a blessing to have five bucks in my pocket before the next paycheque, I sensed a kinship in these pictures: the urgency to get these unconventional movies made, despite little means in their creators' hand-to-mouth existences. Putting my words to paper and getting them out to the world via crummy Business Depot xeroxes was likewise essential to life!
I've recently revisited some of those scruffy xeroxed digest-sized issues, specifically ESR #8 (pictured above) which was published in early 2003. While I felt it was one of the best-written issues to date, I was however disappointed by its look, due to terrible Xerox copies. In hindsight, the harsh contrasty "DIY" look befits the subject matter, as this issue is one of the few to devote many of its pages to independent, underground, experimental (insert your name here) cinema. However, because I was so upset with the print quality of this issue, I began investigating new forms of presentation. In a little over a year, ESR was converted into a tabloid-sized semi-pro rag, from a duplex laser printer, with colour covers.
With a reduced publishing frequency, and an increased devotion to theme issues, the coverage on independent or experimental films was reduced.
As years progress, our priorities change: times of tragedy inform us that there are more important things to worry about; conversely, we experience other things that give us pleasure. And as we get older, many of us become comfortable in our current situations, and find it very difficult to step outside of that bubble again. Somewhere amidst the naivete, self-consciousness, uneven sentence structure and grammatical errors, nearly a dozen years later, I recognize that muse which inspired a lot of these passages. It would be great to have it back.
