Ok, just thought I’d keep you up to date with my latest folly. I really enjoyed doing the genre timeline – with everyone’s help over at the European Film Review forum, of course – although it just proved too much to keep up with, especially as we moved into the sixteis and the number of Italian productions rose exponentially. However, I thought it was a really worthwhile piece of work, and gave a kind of occult history of Italian cinema… one that was based as much on the obscure and the now-fotgotten as the artistic highpoints and big successes.
So… what I’m going to do is revive the timeline, and kick it back, so we start again at 1958. Now what I’m hoping to do this time is spend longer over each year – my initial thoughts are to cover each year ‘fifty years later’, and lump in 58 and 59 for this year. (I’ve chosen 58 because, essentially, of Hercules, which is a bit arbitrary… but it did mark the point at which Italian genre cinema started having significant distribution in the English language markets).
The difference with this incarnation of the genre timeline is
(1) I’m aiming to attempt to review a lot of films from each year rather than just give capsule synopses
(2) I’m going to be a lot more stringent in my research (i.e. making sure only films from 58 are counted in 58!)
(3) I”m going to pull in a lot of information from other sources (i.e. interviews, reference books etc)
and (4) At the end of the year I’ll whizz it up into a downloadable PDF document.
Of course, the way this would work best is if other people are happy to make a contribution, so everything is going to be posted up here!
So… watch this space! My ‘tidied up’ list of 1958 films will be coming soon… (it’s amazing how different this looks from the one that we originally had for 1958, about 25% of the films we had then weren’t actually from 1958!)