Some Sights & Sounds

On my enduring love of lists and the impossible honor of shaping the film canon.

Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karbanová, Daisies, The Criterion Channel

I love pop culture lists. When I was a kid, I would hand-write lists of the Neopets merch I owned or the I Spy books I had read. A few years later, I spent hours transcribing rankings from back issues of Entertainment Weekly on Wordpad since I didn’t have the high-speed internet needed to find out that digital versions already existed. Most recently, I got really into making individual Letterboxd watchlists for every single streaming service I have, which I obsessively updated every month. While plenty of my colleagues use the movie-logging website Letterboxd as a place to post reviews and make watchlists that are meant to be shared, my profile is a strange assemblage of sometimes nearly identical personal checklists that I doubt make much sense to anyone who doesn’t live inside my brain.