Tuesday 6 June 2006

Never Mind The Running Time, Here's The Ruler

Buy a film guide, such as Time Out's Film Guide and marvel at the thousands of pages and bitchy comments about films that you once thought were kind of all right really. Then let your imagination run away with you and leap from page to page looking at random entries.
Find a silent film. Look for the running time. In it's place is the length of the film in feet. So, The General is around 7500 feet. Try putting that on the poster. You'll be telling me next that they had no sound as well.
It interests me when people do things differently and it depresses me when something new takes on old fashioned characteristics. Take the ferry up to London. Tomorrow morning I'll board the 7:30 from Woolwich Arsenal Pier to London Bridge. Lots of other people will get there or further up the river. What will they do? Read a paper. Avoid eye contact with everyone else (except to scare them away from sitting anywhere near them), tut at those wearing something other than a suit and so on. All the conventions of the train adapted to the river. It's a new way of getting to work. We had a chance to do something different. We fucked it up.