This is my 12th year doing a version of Blindspot, so I’m not sure my customary introduction to the concept is still necessary. But just in case: this is a challenge in which you pick 12 films you’ve never seen but should have (your blindspots) and watch them one per month over the next year. It’s a great way of ensuring you watch films that you might otherwise not get round to. Or intending to get round to them, anyway, as I’ve failed to complete the list on various occasions. Always a shame, but not the end of the world.
Anyway, below are my 12 picks for 2024, followed by an unnecessarily long-winded explanation of why I chose them. But to jump ahead of myself slightly: the picks all come from a ranked list, and so are presented here in their order from that list, highest to lowest.
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Rosemary’s Baby |
Yi Yi |
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Army of Shadows |
Only Yesterday |
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Le Trou |
My Darling Clementine |
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Rio Bravo |
The Innocents |
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Where Is the
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Scenes from a Marriage |
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The Cranes Are Flying |
Possession |
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Traditionally, my methodology for choosing my 12 films has been some degree of complicated and thus merited explanation. (“Merited” in the sense that my procedures interest me, even if they don’t interest anyone else.) Last year, I simplified things greatly by basing it around Sight and Sound’s then-new list of greatest films. With this year’s WDYMYHS also being drawn from a list of highly-acclaimed all-timers, I was certain I’d need to return to making Blindspot’s selection process a complicated one.
Well, why make work for yourself when others have already done it? You see, the first step in my Blindspot process is to decide on and/or find lists that are going to contribute to the rankings that will decide this year’s 12. (I could just use the same list(s) year on year, but that would mean I just select the next 12 each time, which seems dull.) Normally one of the first to go in the mix is the IMDb Top 250, but that was ruled out thanks to WDYMYHS, so where else to start? I do have a couple of other go-tos, but then I remembered a list from Letterboxd: The 1001 Greatest Films, ranked as objectively as possible. I won’t regurgitate the whole rationale behind that list here (you can read the introduction at the link for that), but, suffice to say, it’s a list that has already combined multiple other lists with a view to creating a ‘definitive’ greatest films list. (The popular 1,000-film list curated by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? has long had a similar aim, but that has certain baked-in biases that this one aims to correct.) Job done!
Well, not quite. I didn’t just take the list as final gospel — as well as ruling out films I’d already seen (obviously), I applied a few of my own rules to reach my final selection. Firstly, I limited it to things I already own or have near-permanent access to on streamers (I don’t normally trust them to keep content, but the Netflix Ghibli deal seems pretty solid). This was a common decider back when I first started WDYMYHS/Blindspot, but after a few years it seemed prudent to ignore it. I’ve brought it back again now because I’ve got a ludicrous number of films on disc I’ve never watched, so why not start with them rather than downloading even more? It’s not as if I was having to go to the dregs of the list just to include stuff in my collection, either.
Next, my most commonly enforced rule: one film per director. Normally that would have meant including A Brighter Summer Day at the expense of Yi Yi, but I decided to apply another rule I’ve used fairly regularly: no films that I’d failed to watch the year before. So out went A Brighter Summer Day, which I should’ve watched in 2023, and in goes Yi Yi (which I should’ve watched in 2022, but hey, can’t go excluding stuff forever). It also meant ditching Le Samouraï in favour of Army of Shadows. If I were ranking this in terms of my personal anticipation, Le Samouraï would’ve been higher; but the list is the list — if I wanted to make this “any 12 films I want to see”, I could’ve done that as my selection process.
Then, a few bits of housekeeping. Firstly, ruling out films that were also on the WDYMYHS list, as I’d settled on that one first. That took out three: The Wages of Fear, The Best Years of Our Lives, and A Separation. I suppose I could’ve left them on to help further complete the IMDb Top 250 (a ‘guaranteed’ 15 instead of only the 12 that WDYMYHS ‘guarantees’), but, eh. I also ruled out Apur Sansar because it’s the third film in a trilogy and I’ve only seen the first one. I’m not going to watch them out of order, and I didn’t want to commit myself to watching 13 films for a 12-film challenge. I also could have included Werckmeister Harmonies, because I do have a copy (one I went to the effort of bodging together myself from multiple DVD-era sources, to get in-sync subtitles), but there’s reportedly a 4K restoration on the way, so it seems prudent to wait for that to enjoy the film properly. I could’ve included it on the list anyway, as I did with The Hitcher, but look how that worked out. (For those who don’t remember, The Hitcher was on a 2022 list, assuming a promised release from Second Sight would definitely be out that year, but we’re now in 2024 and it’s still not been announced beyond “we’re working on it”.)
Finally, the list includes a couple of movie-adjacent TV series that fell within my catchment zone; specifically, Dekalog and Berlin Alexanderplatz. I’ve often discussed on this blog the blurred line between TV and film, so I didn’t remove them out of snobbery, more out of practicality. I mean, last year I failed to watch nine-hour Shoah, so having either one of ten-hour Dekalog or fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz on the list would likely be a failure in waiting, but having both? Maybe I could’ve attempted one, but it would’ve been inconsistent to only include one when they both qualified. The final decider was this: if I watched either of them under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t count them on the blog (because, y’know, they’re TV series, not films), so I shouldn’t really count them just because they happen to be on a list.
In the end, to get my final 12, I had to go through 36 films — ruling out twice as many as I included. Most of those (15) were simply because I didn’t own them. The remaining nine, I’ve already mentioned. As some kind of insight into those 36 films’ overall standings, the first one I rejected, A Brighter Summer Day, is in the list’s top ten (7th, to be precise), but only four of my final selection are in the top 100, and I had to go as deep as 193rd to finish my 12. Still, it’s always the way: the more acclaimed films you’ve seen, the further you have to go for your next ‘blindspot’.
Favourite Film of the Month
100Films.co.uk 