Anniversaries, vocabularies and why

This brings me to my other site, Piddleville, which began life ten years ago, May 17, 2000. That’s the day I registered the domain. It’s two days late but, Happy anniversary Piddleville!

But back to why. This is what Piddleville’s current manifestation is really all about. The site is essentially focused on movies and is really me asking myself, “Why do I like this? Why don’t I like that?”

Piddleville has had three lives. It began as the site of a fictional town, Piddleville, and included numerous fictional characters. That ran it’s course and it became a personal blog for a while. Then I began Writelife and decided it and Piddleville needed focus. So Writelife was more or less about writing and Piddleville became about movies. (I had been posting a lot about movies there already.)

You could say the current site is Piddleville 3.0.

As I say on Piddleville’s About page, I have no formal education in film. I am not a film historian. I know next to nothing about cinematic criticism. But I figured since I had been watching movies all my life I was more than qualified. After all, they had been made for me.

I knew without having to think about it that what I liked about movies was that they were stories. I liked them for the same reason I liked books – stories. Once I started paying attention to what I was watching and asking myself, “Why?” I soon saw the differences between books and movies. One was words, the other images. Obvious.

But while I had heard about cinema’s vocabulary and kind of knew what it meant, it was only once I started really watching movies that I saw what that meant. I also saw that a story is a story is a story. What makes one more engaging than another is the telling. Movies that worked best for me were movies that really used a vocabulary of images.

You can see, if you go back to the early days of film and follow through its history, how in a general way it began trying to mimic books. Many aspired to be Literature (yes, the capitalized one). (See Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 1951 – note how Piddleville looks as well, an earlier incarnation.) Over time, however, it got out from under that tyranny and really began to explore a language of film.

And while one of the least informed of reviewers, that is the kind of thing that fascinates me: stories and how they are told.

In a very broad, general and “don’t hold me to this” kind of way, Writelife is about stories told with words and Piddleville about stories told with images. In both cases, story is the key.

With ten years under its belt, Piddleville shows me this isn’t a passing fancy I have.

(You’ll notice Piddleville hasn’t been updated in a while but that is because I’ve been focused on Writelife and, busy with other things, I haven’t been watching movies to the extent I use to. So it’s on something of a sabbatical. However, there are over a hundred reviews online there.

You’ll also notice, should you go on an amble through Piddleville, it’s a shambles. This is due to it being ten years old and some of the early material was created by a fool who had no idea what he was doing online.)