Malcolm Gladwell says you need to put 10,000 hours into an endeavor in order to become an expert at it.So, having recently crossed the 5,000-film threshold, that pretty much gets me up to my 10,000 and makes me an expert on cinema.
No, your average film is not two hours long. It's shorter. But I'm over 5,000 films (5,017), plus there are the 650 films that I've seen more than once, some of them upwards of ten times. So yeah, I think I'm reaching 10,000 hours right about ... now.
And yet I feel like I have so much left to learn.
Gladwell talked about 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice," but he didn't talk about the right way to practice and the wrong way.
Presumably, if you do 10,000 hours of any task, the sheer quantity makes you an expert at it. Over that many hours, even if you choose poorly, you get the exposure you need to the medium or trade or hobby or pastime to be considered "world class," another Gladwell phrase.
Yet my own 10,000 hours seem so front-loaded toward the last 30 years that I sometimes wonder.
It became especially stark for me last week, when I realized I've seen only ten films from what is widely considered to be one of the greatest years in the history of cinema, 1939. (Also the year my dad was born, so I'm partial to that year.)
The number of films I've seen from 2015?
Two hundred twenty-seven.
It's pretty stark. But it also has an explanation. When you are a working film critic, you expect to see more films from the period that you're working than from other times. It's just a job hazard. And when you're not seeing those films, you still try to have a life. You see the classics, but you have to do other things too.
I suppose many critics gave their film love a solid foundation in college, when they were not yet working critics and ate up a wide range of influential films from early in cinema's history. But that wasn't me. I did watch those films in film classes, but on my own time, I was still watching mostly contemporary movies. That happened to be my way in to movies. Your mileage may vary.
Complicating matters for me is that I don't just see the films I've been reviewing for the past two decades, but whatever other films I can get my hands on from the release year. That's not only to broaden my appreciation of cinematic trends and current filmmakers whose careers may inform my future writing, but also because for the past 22 years, I've been ranking my films from first to worst, and everywhere in between. I've got the mentality of a big game hunter, except I'm also a small game hunter. If it's out there, I hunt it and make it part of my collection.
So it's important to do things like my annual series on this blog, where in 2018 I'm watching two films per month from respected auteurs whose work I have not seen. Of course, the mere fact of not having seen any films directed by Ernst Lubitsch prior to February underscores just how far behind I feel in my alleged expertise.
I didn't mean for this post to be "Oh woe is me, I suck at the thing I love," because I've made the choices I've made and would probably not make them differently if I had to make them again. But it is a good reminder of how vast the world of cinema is, and how watching 10,000 hours of movies is different from shooting an arrow into a target for 10,000 hours, or figure skating for 10,000 hours, or painting 10,000 hours worth of bowls of fruit. It's not an apples to apples comparison between these endeavors. I'd like to think that if I'd spent those 10,000 hours on archery, I might indeed be an Olympic archer. Ten thousand hours on movies still challenges me and leaves me with so much distance still to go.
But I'm glad that 10,000 hours in, the endeavor still feels fresh to me. If I'd felt I'd mastered it, maybe now would be the time to quit. Maybe I could just drop the mic and start on 10,000 hours of hedge animals.
Instead, I'm ready for the next 10,000.
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