That's usually with films I haven't seen, but it doesn't have to be.
I had an idea lined up for 2023, and I was going to be happy enough with it -- I won't tell you what it was in case I do it in 2024, which seems pretty likely. (Film noir knows the feeling, having gotten bumped back from 2020 to 2021.)
But in December I found something more urgent.
In 2022 I had 85 rewatches of films I'd seen previously, which is becoming more the normal number, though obviously that was inflated by the 26 rewatches of my previous #1s. (Twenty-seven, actually, since I rewatched Inside Out twice.) I remember the years when I'd only rewatch about a dozen. It wasn't that long ago.
The decade breakdown of these rewatches was as follows:
2020s - 15
2010s - 21
2000s - 22
1990s - 14
1980s - 11
1970s - 1
1960s - 1
So essentially I only rewatched movies from my own lifetime.
Only one of the 84 films (Inside Out twice) was released before I was born, that being Herk Harvey's cult classic Carnival of Souls from 1962. And even when I watched that, it was the result of an intentional choice to watch something older -- to intentionally buck my personal preference of revisiting recent favorites.
In 2023, I intend to make that choice once a month.
I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to organize it, but it may be as simple as rewatching the top 12 movies on my Flickchart that were released prior to October 20, 1973, that I've seen only once. (And yes, I'll be turning 50 in 2023, giving this series an additional resonance that I didn't consider until I actually started writing this post.)
I would like to keep a little flexibility in my viewings, though, so it might not be as regimented as that. But I'll certainly use these highly ranked one-timers as a starting point for my selections.
To be clear, not every year is as bad as 2022 was in this regard, but 2021 wasn't much better. Given that 2020 and 2021 were both pandemic years, they featured a lot of cinematic comfort food, not "homework" like rewatching black and white movies. And then in 2019, I was rewatching mostly films from the previous decade in order to finalize my best of the decade.
When I tried to think back to a classic I had rewatched recently, I thought of 12 Angry Men -- that was pretty recently, right?
No. It was nearly six years ago, in March of 2017.
That's not the last older movie I rewatched, but the fact that it was the first one that came to mind is saying something.
It'll help that I don't have an intense viewing project that focuses on recent films, as I did in 2019 and 2022, and that I don't have two pandemic years, as I did in 2020 and 2021. So the last four years can be written off, really, and not demonstrative of my overall tendencies as a cinephile.
Still, to suggest those years say nothing about my viewings of older movies is also clearly incorrect. If I tended to revisit movies from before I was born with regularity, they might have been the comfort films I watched in 2020 and 2021.
I may never get to considering the sorts of movies I'll watch for this series to be comfort food. As a cinephile, I definitely prioritize the new, or personal nostalgia, over becoming a master of the seven decades of film that preceded my birth.
But I can get closer to that idealized state, and watching movies I haven't seen is only one part of it. It's rewatching the older movies I've loved that may really start to deepen my appreciation.
And what'll I call this series?
I'm starting to run out of clever plays on the word Audient -- have been for several years now -- so let's just go with Audient Classics.
Has a bit of a classic ring, no?
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