As I noted a couple of entries ago, I spend a lot of time online these days, especially when the weather is as rotten as it is today. I spend a lot of that time on Youtube, watching whatever takes my fancy, perpetually looking for that new fascination to get into. I just came across something interesting on there though. It seems to me that the quality of discourse I’m encountering on Youtube is getting better and better, especially when it comes to film criticism and reactions to film. Where most online video reactions to film were once decidedly fannish, what I’m finding nowadays is becoming ever more articulate and cine-literate.

I just came across a great example of this. I clicked on Lindsay Ellis’s video about Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations thinking it would be just another kid talking about and reacting to a film in the most basic way, but what I found was something perceptive, articulate and well informed. Ellis clearly had a knowledge of film of at least bachelor level, yet had chosen to express her thoughts via short online videos rather than prose. She gives her viewers a lot of information about the history of film and the creative process behind specific films. At the same time, her videos incorporated much of the humour and textual play one finds in fandom; there is even a certain cheekiness to them. I found my admiration growing by the moment.

This is a great example of what I call in my master’s the hybrid of cinephilia and fandom. That third discourse has emerged even more strongly than I imagined since I graduated in 2014. I still keep en eye on it, and it seems to be flourishing. Online people are having fun with film, yet that fun is becoming more and more cerebral as it takes on elements of analysis. It would thus seem that people like Ellis are proving me right.