20 years and 250 000 visitors

Spring of 1997 was a pivotal time for me in several respects. I moved out for the first time, leaving my parents to move in with some friends instead. I went on my first trip abroad by myself (to Rome) and found it so simulating I often wish I did nothing else. I sent my very first email. And, more relevant for this blog, this was also the year I had my first film article published, in the Swedish film journal Filmrutan. The article was about Alexander Mackendrick, and I have been writing for Filmrutan ever since. So I have been writing about film professionally, more or less, for 20 years as of now. I felt this was cause for a self-celebratory post. In addition, I just had my 250 000th visitor at this particular blog, and although these statistics are not exactly foolproof (how many of these visitors are bots or web crawlers?) they still mean something. So I figured I could celebrate that too.

Curtis and Lancaster, directed by Mackendrick in Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

For the first couple of years Filmrutan was the only place for which I wrote, but then I began writing for a now defunct journal called Cinema, published by Stockholm International Film Festival. That was around 1999-2001, and it was great fun. I wrote reviews, both long ones and capsules, did some more journalistic assignments and also several interviews with interesting filmmakers, for some reason primarily from the eastern parts of Europe, such as Jiří Menzel, Jasmin Dizdar, János Szász, Milcho Manchevski and Pantelis Voulgaris from Greece.

Now I write, and have written, for several different outlets, published a book, and contributed chapters to edited collections (the latest one is about Budd Boetticher). To keep track of it, both for myself and for anybody who might like to read stuff I have published outside this blog, I have made a page with a list of everything I can remember, and with links to those pieces that are available online. The page is to be found at the right, upper corner of the blog, above Rue du cinéma, and here is a link too:

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/p/journals-and-books-and-other-writing-by.html

My statistics also tell me which of my posts here are the most popular ones. This is the top ten (or 11) as of writing:

1) About Robert Warshow
2) About Tokyo Story
3) About Henry Hathaway
4) About trains in paintings (a very short post)
5) About deep focus
6) About growing old in the films of Ozu and Hawks
7) About teaching
8) About Bergman's favourite films
9) About André Bazin as a TV critic
10) About W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka
10) About Maya Deren

As you can see that is a very disparate collection. I have been blogging since 2005 (first a Swedish film blog and then this one from 2009 when I moved to Scotland) so that is 12 years of almost uninterrupted blogging, yet I never know what will turn out to be popular and what will not, and I am usually surprised.

I wonder if I will still be writing 12 years from now. But first I must think of something to write for next week. This post does not really count.