Online Movie Discourse Diaries (Part 1)
Recently a dear friend of mine asked me about how do I feel about the discourse surrounding Richard Linklater’s new film “Nouvelle Vague” and while I was so confused about what “discourse” she’s talking about, she enlightened me that the film community of Farsi Twitter didn’t really like the film and consider it as an absolute disrespect to the marvelous Jean-Luc Godard. While as a full-time Godard hater I do disagree with Nouvelle Vague tarnishing his image (I essentially enjoyed the film), I think the experience of watching a movie without having a whole community shit-talking or glazing that movie to your ears is a blessing that unfortunately most of us don’t get the opportunity of in the age of logging films to our Letterboxd account and wrapping up our review after their 10 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Letterboxd fan (till they add DMs at one point), and I believe the shift of online movie discourse from Twitter to Letterboxd is perchance the best thing that can happen to the medium. Twitter by far is the worst app for have any genuine discussion about any topic and additionally highlights aspects of the movies that aren’t even critical in the first place. For sure, Letterboxd isn’t flawless either since there’s huge tendency to come up with one-liners as a progressive type of reviewing to gain more likes in compare to thoughtful texts, still the flow of the discussion follows a better structure and more “cinephilic” approach than rage baiting 24/7 on Twitter.