This year, I suspect, it will be more difficult than usual to pick the right films. Most of my favorite filmmakers — Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Dardennes, Pedro Costa, Jean-Luc Godard, Arnaud Desplechin, Lisandro Alonso, Catherine Breillat, Chantal Akerman, Nicolas Klotz, and Elisabeth Perceval (I’m sure I’m forgetting others) — are absent this year, and what little positive critical consensus that came out of Cannes was for two films that aren’t part of the TIFF lineup: Leo Carax’s Holy Motors and Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet. There are new films by PT Anderson and Terrence Malick to see, but those will both play in Knoxville. Haneke won another Palme d’Or, but for a film about which I’m unable to muster the slightest bit of enthusiasm. Carlos Reygadas continues to experiment with form, but the reviews I’ve read make Post Tenebras Lux sound like the cinephile’s equivalent of sour medicine. (“Time to take the Reygadas.”)

The good news is that Tsai Ming-liang is back, even if Walker (pictured above) is only 26 minutes. De Oliveira has a new film starring Jeanne Moreau, Michael Lonsdale, and Claudia Cardinale! I’ll be able to see Raul Ruiz’s final two films (one of them completed posthumously by his wife and long-time collaborator, Valeria Sarmiento), along with new work by Brian De Palma, Christian Petzold, Hong Sang-soo, Abbas Kiarostami, Olivier Assayas, and Bernard Emond. Some excellent (relatively) young filmmakers will be there: Cristian Mungiu, Jem Cohen, Sergei Loznitsa, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Miguel Gomes, Mati Diop, Lucien Castaing-Taylor ,and João Pedro Rodrigues among them. And most exciting of all: Wavelengths, which has always been my favorite part of the festival, now includes a full lineup of feature films (formerly programmed as Visions) that is incredibly strong.

After crunching the numbers, I’ve whittled TIFF’s 300 or so films down to these 75, ranked in preferential order by program. I’ll try to see everything in Wavelengths, most of Masters, a few each from Discovery, Vanguard, and TIFF Cinematheque, and as many as I can manage from CWC and Special Presentations. The schedule-makers will inevitably make many of these decisions for me.

Any and all recommendations are much appreciated.

Contemporary World Cinema

• Barbara (Christian Petzold)
• Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
• In The Fog (Sergei Loznitsa)
• The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi)
• 3 (Pablo Stoll Ward)
• Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl)
• Sleeper’s Wake (Barry Berk)
• The Crimes of Mike Recket (Bruce Sweeney)
• Clandestine Childhood (Benjamín Ávila)
• Dead Europe (Tony Krawitz)
• The Holy Quaternity (Jan Hrebejk)
• Kinshasa Kids (Marc-Henri Wajnberg)
• Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica (Marcelo Gomes)
• Watchtower (Pelin Esmer)
• The Lesser Blessed (Anita Doron)
• Comrade Kim Goes Flying (Anja Daelemans)

Discovery

• Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder)
• Krivina (Igor Drljaca)
• Tower (Kazik Radwanski)
• La Sirga (William Vega)
• The Interval (Leonardo Di Costanzo)
• Our Little Differences (Sylvie Michel)
• Augustine (Alice Winocour)
• Clip (Maja Milos)

Masters

• Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira)
• Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz)
• In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo)
• Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu)
• Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
• Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)
• All That You Possess (Bernard Émond)
• The End of Time (Peter Mettler)
• Everyday (Michael Winterbottom)
• Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci)
• Amour (Michael Haneke)

Special Presentations

• Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento)
• Dormant Beauty (Marco Bellocchio)
• Passion (Brian De Palma)
• To The Wonder (Terrence Malick)
• No (Pablo Larraín)
• The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Reality (Matteo Garrone)
• Foxfire (Laurent Cantet)
• Rebelle [War Witch] (Kim Nguyen)
• White Elephant (Pablo Trapero)
• Lore (Cate Shorland)
• In the House (François Ozon)
• Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan)
• Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter)
• The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg)

TIFF Cinematheque

• Stromboli (1950, Roberto Rossellini)
• The Cloud Capped Star (1960, Ritwik Ghatak)
• Loin du Viêtnam (1967, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Varda, Godard, Marker & Resnais)
• The Bitter Ash (1963, Larry Kent)

Vanguard

• Room 237 (Rodney Ascher)
• Sightseers (Ben Wheatley)
• Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)
• Motorway (Soi Cheang)

Wavelengths

• The Capsule (Athina Rachel Tsangari) and Walker (Tsai Ming-liang)
• Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
• Wavelengths 1
• Wavelengths 3
• Mekong Hotel (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul) and Big in Vietnam (Mati Diop)
• The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rul Guerra da Mata)
• Wavelengths 2
• Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel)
• Wavelengths 4
• differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey)
• Far From Afghanistan (John Gianvito, Jon Jost, et al)
• Bestiaire (Denis Côté)
• When Night Falls (Ying Liang)
• Three Sisters (Wang Bing)
• Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas)
• Viola (Matías Piñeiro) and Birds (Gabriel Abrantes)
• The Fifth Season (Peter Brosens, Jessica Woodworth)

I was in my twenties when I built the first version of Long Pauses. In a move that still gives me occasional pangs of regret, I’d decided a few months earlier to give up my graduate research fellowship and take a full-time job as a multimedia developer and instructional designer, figuring that a steady paycheck and a boring day job would bring some stability to our lives while also keeping me motivated to study for my comprehensive exams. I must have been under the spell of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who managed, miraculously, to write quite a few good stories after tolling away all day at the Custom House.

Long Pauses was intended to be a workspace for testing out ideas, both as a writer and a web developer. Looking back over the hundreds of posts contained within it today, as I’ve done in recent months preparing for this relaunch, I think it’s met that goal. A quick scroll through the various design iterations is a useful snapshot of web design trends over the past decade – from table layouts and FONT tags to javascript, cascading stylesheets, and database-driven content management. (I’ll always remember 2002-2006 as the days of 11px Verdana.) Technically, the word “blog” predates Long Pauses by a year, but I’d certainly never heard it when I was poring over my copy of The Quickstart Guide to HTML. (I didn’t move to Blogger until Version 5 and didn’t add commenting until Version 7.) My writing has evolved, too, though not as impressively as I would’ve liked. It’s still too precious, too littered with em-dashes, and too reliant on pseudo-intellectual space-fillers. (I hereby promise to retire the word “defamiliarize” and, instead, make a greater effort to describe, specifically, how a particular work of art defamiliarizes the world.)

I shelved Long Pauses in 2010, soon after my daughter was born, because, frankly, the web had become boring. Like everyone else, I’d made the move to Facebook and Twitter, both of which facilitate the kind of small talk I hate so much (and am so very, very bad at) in real life. This relaunch is an effort to steal back those hours of my life, to rediscover silence and the hard work of writing, and to stop giving a shit whether that person I haven’t spoken to in twenty years likes my latest photo of Rory. On a more practical level, I also want to reclaim ownership of my content and to file it away in a searchable, logical, movable archive.

Launching a blog in 2012 is nothing like I experienced eleven years ago. I remember sitting at my little cubicle at work back then, exchanging emails with Pascual Espiritu, whose website, Strictly Film School, was one of the very few places outside of usenet groups and discussion forums where I could read about contemporary foreign cinema on the Internet. I ate up her advice and mimicked as best as I could her design aesthetic for Version 1 of Long Pauses. I discovered just a few days ago, even, that longpauses.com was still associated with the antiquated domain registration service she recommended to me then.

Over the next few years, the film blogosphere slowly evolved, thanks in large part to free, user-friendly services like LiveJournal, TypePad, and Blogger, and along with it came a new community of writers, many of whom have since become friends. Revisiting those days has made me all kinds of nostalgic. For good and bad, the early bloggers were creating a new and vital communications medium. (I was notified a year or two ago by a graduate researcher that I’ve been credited officially with coining the term “blogathon.” My name and Showgirls are forever linked, apparently – and in the most wonderfully esoteric way!) When I mentioned on Twitter that I was rebuilding Long Pauses, one friend wondered how we had ever found the time to write so much, and my off-hand answer was that we blogged instead of pissing our efforts into the social networking ether. That’s at least partly true, I suspect. Just as likely a culprit is the exponential growth – the goddam deluge – of content that now threatens to drown us all. There’s too much to digest and reflect upon, so we skim it all and retain little more than trivia. (Cue the Portlandia “Did you read?” sketch.)

Generally speaking, what remains of the original filmblog dialogue has relocated to Twitter and to sites that grew out of the blogosphere but now more closely resemble traditional publications with editors and teams of contributors – places like Indiewire, Mubi, Slant, the AV Club, and Fandor. Don’t get me wrong: film blogs still exist in large numbers, but the discussion has moved (or evolved, or in some cases atrophied). Girish’s site is one of the few living monuments to a kind of conversation that was once more common and that I now miss. (I love that Girish still uses his original Blogger template. He told me once that he briefly considered changing it but decided that it’s become too essential to the voice of his blog.)

None of that is news, really. But what surprised me as I combed through the Long Pauses archive is that vast swaths of the original blogosphere are gone. Many of the sites I once included on my blogroll of “daily reads” have been deleted entirely, and the authors have vanished right along with them. Presumably, they’ve settled into new phases of their lives – like me, they’re now raising children or managing greater responsibilities in their professional lives; like me, they’re in their forties – while others simply lost interest after a short-lived burst of blogging enthusiasm. The Wayback Machine salvages bits and pieces of the wreckage, but the Internet, it turns out, is an ephemeral place. Moreso than I’d imagined. (I was disappointed to discover a few days ago that someone has beaten me to the punch: Internet Archaeology is already a thing.) Our virtual world is indeed a palimpsest.

This gone-tomorrow-ness of the Internet is another of my motivations for relaunching Long Pauses. For archival purposes (and at the risk of offending friends and editors) I’ve added essays and interviews to this site that were originally published elsewhere, and I’ve noted them as such. I can control my database; others are a fickle business. I’ve also made the move to WordPress and have tagged and categorized every single post, giving Long Pauses its first-ever relational structure, along with a slightly more usable main menu. (The term “Debris” comes from my long-standing habit of creating hodgepodge posts called “Miscellaneous Debris.” “Debris” includes all posts not categorized as “film,” “music,” or “words.” Two other recurring themes from the archive — Songs of the Moment and Mix Tapes — have also found their way into the navigation.)

And one final word on Version 13: This is the first iteration of Long Pauses that I didn’t design by hand. It’s a modded version of Slate from Okay Themes. Why did I buy a template? I’m not a web designer. Not really. I was supposed to be a professor, after all. I stumbled backwards into this career and have only in recent months worked my way, finally, into a job title that more accurately describes what I’m good at: communications director. I plan to build my first responsive design this fall, and I’m beginning to know my way around the WordPress functions.php file. But for the time being I’m content to benefit from others’ talent and devote my efforts, instead, to learning how to be a writer again.

As always, thanks for reading.

I’d been thinking about shuttering this iteration of Long Pauses for quite some time, but the timeline was accelerated by Blogger’s decision to end their FTP service. When I finish this post and click “publish,” the last bits of content will be pushed to longpauses.com/blog, where it will stay, in this form, for as long as I decide it belongs there. I’ve archived it all and might eventually drop it into another format, but for now I’m content to let it stand as a document of this stage in my life.

I’m not sure how long — or even if — commenting will work. I’d hoped to post this a few days ago to leave more time for that kind of thing, but my daughter’s early arrival threw a wrench — a wonderful, beautiful wrench — into the works. You can find me on Twitter and Facebook, and I suspect you’ll eventually see me back here at Long Pauses.

Until then, thanks for reading.

The variety of communications tools would be overwhelming but for the fact that my friends and I are engaged in what is essentially a single, extended conversation. It’s all come to feel perfectly natural. I suppose some tools (forums, long-form blogs) are more suitable for, say, serious debate than others, while Twitter is obviously more immediate and superficial. And Facebook — wonderful, addictive Facebook — is so damn good at social networking that it’s changed the way I use the Internet (despite my long-held resistance to it). Perhaps we could draw an analogy between these tools and the various types of conversations we have with local friends when we go out together for a long dinner, sit side-by-side at a book club meeting, or run into each other at the grocery store.

Long Pauses version 11 is a snapshot of how I’m currently using the Internet. It’s almost literally divided down the middle, with frequently updated microposts on the left and occasional, more thoughtful bits of content on the right. Feel free to interact with it however you like. Here’s a breakdown of the web apps (all of them free) I’ve stitched together for this strange patchwork of a site:

Blogger
Because Long Pauses predates blogging, I jumped on the first free, viable tool that didn’t require a locally-hosted database. Seven years later, I have nearly a 1,000 posts in Blogger and, both out of familiarity and laziness, have resisted moving to a more robust CMS like WordPress or Expression Engine. Frankly, I kind of enjoy solving the problems associated with building an entire site from a single template.

Haloscan
Early iterations of Blogger didn’t include a commenting feature, so my first add-on was Haloscan. Again, by the time Blogger caught up, I had a deep archive of comments that I was hesitant to abandon. Until now. Because Haloscan uses a pop-up window, the advent of tabbed browsing has made it a major pain in the ass. I’ve officially made the switch to Blogger comments, which will hopefully prove to be more user-friendly and readable. However, the old archive still exists. At the bottom of each post, you’ll notice a small, grayed-out discussion icon. For a trip down memory lane, click that icon on old posts to read past comments.

Twitter
I resisted Twitter until the Facebook addiction kicked in. Once I figured out how to synch Twitter with my Facebook status, it was all over. I’m hooked.

Tumblr
The front page of Long Pauses version 10 was actually built from two Blogger blogs — Long Pauses and Miscellaneous Debris. It was an ugly and unsatisfying hack involving a PHP include, but it was the best solution I could come up with at the time. And then I found Tumblr and its embed javascript. Miscellaneous Debris has become a kind of Siamese Twin — a separate blog with a unique purpose (collecting random oddities from the web) but still joined at the hip of Long Pauses. You can leave comments there and subscribe to its feed. The ten most recent bits of debris will display on every page of the main site.

Disqus
Tumblr doesn’t yet have a built-in commenting feature, but Disqus can be added by copying and pasting two lines of code into a Tumblr template. Added bonus: Disqus publishes an rss feed.

Let me know if you find anything broken.

Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree last year changed my relationship with Knoxville. There’s more poetry here now, and more grime and ash. Suttree‘s one of the main reasons I no longer blink before calling Knoxville my home town, even though I’ve only lived here for just over a decade. Local historian, hopeless nostalgist, and drinker-of-PBR Jack Neely went digging around at the Tennessee Valley Authority and unearthed some documents that were collected during a post-New Deal-era survey of local rivers. He writes:

The shore of the river, at the foot of the bluffs, was cheap property, unclaimed for other purposes, in large part because the wild river often flooded. Down there was some legitimate business, especially barge-oriented industry, but no one spent much money on construction there because next spring’s flood might ruin it. In between the wharves and the flotsam of an industrial river town were places where human beings lived in a gray zone between abject homelessness and mere poverty. Squatters, mostly, some lived in jury-rigged cliff dwellings, some on sand-bar islands, some in beached houseboats, many of them fashioned from the tin roof of a lost barn, an old billboard, or a portion of a wrecked barge.

The surveyor’s diary is fascinating, but it’s the photos that kill me. They’ll look shockingly familiar to anyone who’s ever read Suttree with an active imagination.