DONALFOREMAN.COM / BLOG

FIVE NEW FILMS
• Two Lovers (James Gray)
• 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
• Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
• Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
• Facs of Life (Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson)

FIVE OLD FILMS
• Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975) at Anthology Film Archives
• Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963) at the Different Directions Film Festival
• J’entends plus la guitare (Philippe Garrel, 1991), bought at Kim’s Video & Music store
• Loren Cass (Chris Fuller, 2006) at the Cinema Village 
• Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005) at the Bratislava International Film Festival

FIVE LIVE EVENTS
• Vivienne Dick’s “New York. No Wave. Super 8” event at the Cork Film Festival
• The projection of The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1965) at the 16th monthly Experimental Film Club in Dublin
• Ken Jacob’s presentation of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and his own Blonde Cobra (1963) at the Millennium Film Workshop as part of the HOWL! festival, including Jacob’s own live soundtrack additions to the projection of Blonde Cobra...
• Arin Crumley and Kieran Masterton’s successful fundraising campaign for the Open Indie project on Kickstarter.com
• Ben Morea’s public talk at 16 Beaver

FIVE ALBUMS
• It’s Blitz, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Coat to Wear, Patrick Kelleher
• Actor, St. Vincent
• Lisa O’Neill has an album, Lisa O’Neill
• The Crying Light, Antony and the Johnsons

It’s been a quiet year for this blog, mainly because it hasn’t been one for me. Travelling and filmmaking have taken precedence for the moment, and, alas, next year may not be so different. But this isn’t to say there aren’t lots of things I’d love to write about, and to prove it, here’s a list of fifteen things I’ve been meaning to write this year—notes for each of which have been sitting, neglected, in the draft box of this blog account for some time. I’m presenting them here in the hope that it may guilt me into knocking a few of them out in the new year. Fingers crossed.

1. TO DIY OR NOT TO DIY: A discussion of the limitations and possibilities of the DIY film distribution movement, as exemplified by the likes of Arin Crumley and the Workbook Project.
2. 10 REASONS NOT TO DESPAIR ABOUT DUBLIN CULTURE: An optimistic run-down of some of the promising cultural spaces, events and activities currently developing in Dublin.
3. VISION: An exploration of the nature of directorial “vision”, particularly how directors like Garrel can make a film as if “through their eyes”, with a distinct singularity of perspective, despite not operating the camera and not micro-managing the composition of the images. Thinking about notions of images with and without “integrity”, perhaps bringing in Serge Daney’s notion of the image vs. the visual.
4. DIRECTING ATMOSPHERES: Analysing and comparing the directorial strategies and peformances of some of the great auteurs that have been caught in the act, at length: Lynch, Tarkovsky, Cassavetes, Kiarostami, and a few others based on second-hand accounts: Garrel, Malick, Wong Kar-Wai.
5. COPYRIGHT IS THEFT: An attempt to articulate and justify my instinctive disdain for copyright and intellectual property laws, and tease out  some of my own contradictions that I’m sure are lurking in there somewhere.
6. STOP: The critically acute and self-aware but ultimately self-defeating politics of the The Sopranos.
7. COUNTER-WIRES: Looking for hints of alternatives to the institutional structures exposed so well in The Wire, from within the show itself—despite its admittedly “wholly pessimistic” creator’s belief that there is no hope of change.
8. SWEET AND SOUR CAUSES: A comparative study of two recent films, each of which followed a boy and a girl from alienated family contexts as they wandered around together for a day—Kisses (Lance Daly, 2008) and Only (Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds, 2008). I want to link both back to the wandering and family-making of Rebel Without a Cause (Nicolas Ray, 1955).
9. COMPLEX: Some thoughts on the bizarre mix of cinematic sheen and historical fidelity that was The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, 2008).
10. ROBERT KRAMER RESOURCES: A compendium of all the available English written material on Kramer, based on what I discovered during and since completing my thesis. (I really should have gotten this together for the tenth anniversary of Kramer’s death last month.)
11. …THEN LET THEM SHOOT HDV: The pros and cons of filmmaking as both a tool and an end in itself in first and second level education, as well as in projects with “disadvantaged” communities—drawing on my own experience as a teenager filmmaker and subsequent involvement in the Fresh Film Festival and as a workshop facilitator for young people.
12. WES ANDERSON (or I HAVE THIS “FRIEND” WHO HAS THIS “PROBLEM”): Trying to get to the bottom of my problem with Wes Anderson’s films.
13. WHAT HEART?: Trying to get to the bottom of my problem with the Coen Brothers’ films.
14. YOU AND ME, PROBABLY: Taking The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977) and extending its observations and implications on to my own generation’s lost and alienated.
15. THE TIME OF DAY: This will be a hard one. The thing that got me into film: the ineffable emotional dividend of certain moods, tones, sounds, textures, shades of light… drawing out some aesthetic and philosophical ideas from the power of this, and using a lot of frame grabs from Terrence Malick movies.