I had started this newsletter in January 2023 with the idea that I would put down my thoughts about all the films I watched in a calendar month and publish a post of those collated jottings. There was little to no discipline: very much a case of one and done. I got busy with multiple things in the next few months: floating on cloud nine, trying to finish a postgraduate degree, figuring out the job market. Suffice it to say that updating this space was not a priority. I also wrote far more selectively about films on my blog (“Cinephile Stock”).
Recently, it struck me that I no longer wanted to hitch the wagon to the demands of the WordPress site. I have enjoyed it a lot for nearly a decade but the constant tweaking of the site’s visual aesthetic and having to also be part of that herd where one adds a bundle of images to a post about a film just so it reads better (apparently) got to me. And I had personally hated the name “Cinephile Stock” ever since I came up with it in 2017: the former word is anathema to most people who love films and I’m no exception, and the latter was a bit of oversmart wordplay that didn’t make sense. On the other hand, the name of the newsletter I liked a lot, and the interface of Substack just makes more sense for something like film reviews. To me, at least. Starting this week, then, I’ll be attempting to put out a review or an essay every week – fretting over the fucking visual quality be damned! I have done something similar before when I split the WordPress blog into separate essay and film reviews spaces, so it isn’t a massive change. The format, to my mind, will be more liberating and allow me to focus purely on writing about a film. Over time, I will import all the posts from Cinephile Stock to DfaDR so that everything is then accessible in the same space. As for my essays, they’ll continue to go up on Varun Oak-Bhakay’s Writer’s Block (good name, not least because my favourite uncle tends to call me “Writer’s Block”, which is usually a good-natured dig to get me to write with greater frequency) but they might also find space here. Something else might be round the corner as well, so if you’re into the international relations/political science/war racket, hang around for that too.
Oh, and I also am still doing the podcast (“Picture Shuru”): I just need to find time to watch stuff and record a bunch of episodes, but until then, how about checking out the one on Shah Rukh Khan? Or Sriram Raghavan? Or biopics? Or war the Bollywood way? Or intellectual property? Currently in development are a series of episodes on legendary filmmaker David Lean and some stepaside conversations with regular people and how they watch films, so please subscribe, listen to everything released so far, and fasten your seatbelts!
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