Introduction

Welcome! This post provides an introduction to the Time Travel Movie Club - what it is and where we’ll be going. Ten decades of film, viewed at 12fpy (“films per year”). It also announces our theme of the year for 2019.

Will Bishop
2019-01-29

Table of Contents

The Concept

For a long time, I’ve thought a great idea for a movie club would be to watch movies from decades past. You could travel back in time and watch films from exactly 20 years ago for example. Or 30 years, or 40 years. You would get this small slice of film history to browse through, a 12-month time-capsule defined in relation to the present. And each new year you could browse the next slice of history.

One way to implement this is to spread the selections across many decades, picking 1 film from each decade’s annual time-capsule. Here are the time-capsule years for 2019:

Sounds like a good excuse to watch great movies! Why not make it into a club, in a very real and non-binding sense1? An experiment in temporal film discovery. The Time Travel Movie Club. Over the course of a year, we sample from 10 decades of film, 1 film per month2. The 2019 schedule looks like this:

TTMC 2019 Schedule
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
film year 1929 1939 1949 1959 1969 1979 1989 1999 2009 2019 ???? ????

Theme of the Year

But obviously we need more Arbitrary Constraints®! There are too many wonderful films to choose from, even in our year long time-capsules3. So let’s pick a theme to adhere to – i.e. some (loose) guiding star to steer by as we float down the decades.

To decide on a theme for the first year of T.T.M.C.®4, I asked some friends to help5. The chart below tallies survey results from some proposed themes (and a few write-ins)6.

And the winner is…….Road Trip! A journey through time and space. Sometimes with a clear destination, sometimes more of a dander7, but very often transformative to the participants. Think O Brother, Where Art Thou?, It Happened One Night, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Lord of the Rings. Over the course of the year, we’ll have to dig in and explore this theme in more detail, but I think we have some good films in store.

Photo by Nextvoyage from Pexels

Figure 1: Photo by Nextvoyage from Pexels

To Be Continued…

So stay tuned and join us on this journey through 10 decades of film! We’ll be viewing at 12 films-per-year, 24 frames-per-second. I’ll be posting January’s 1929 selection shortly!

  1. requiring not much of anything but some reading of IMDB and watching movies↩

  2. With our extra two months at the end of the year, we get two “wild cards” to pick from any year we want↩

  3. for example, 1939 is considered by some to be the single greatest year of cinema!↩

  4. not actually trademarked, but now I know the keyboard shortcut↩

  5. thanks friends!!!↩

  6. note: people could vote for more than one theme, and they were instructed to vote for two↩

  7. dander: a wander with purpose.↩

Corrections

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Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/wcmbishop/time-travel-movie-club, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Bishop (2019, Jan. 29). Time Travel Movie Club: Introduction. Retrieved from https://wcmbishop.github.io/time-travel-movie-club/posts/2019-01-29-introduction/

BibTeX citation

@misc{bishop2019introduction,
  author = {Bishop, Will},
  title = {Time Travel Movie Club: Introduction},
  url = {https://wcmbishop.github.io/time-travel-movie-club/posts/2019-01-29-introduction/},
  year = {2019}
}