Frankly, it is becoming clearer every day that online engagement with film is becoming more and more advanced: every morning I go to Youtube to watch more and more articulate and knowledgable analyses of film, delivered through video. I was just watching this quite fascinating analysis of the prologue of Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, for example. The thing is, it still makes me think back to my MA. I’m still extremely interested in how people engage with film. I don’t mean just watching film, but what they then say about the film they just watched and how they say it. It is this how which seems to now be evolving faster and faster, as online film analysis seems to be acquiring more and more of the intellectual facets of what we call cinephilia, but retaining the playfulness and enthusiasm of fandom. It interests me how the video I found earlier incorporates footage not just from Jackson’s films, but from other Tolkien adaptations and computer games based on his work.

Thus to a certain extent I can’t help suspecting that my 2014 thesis is now somewhat redundant and outdated (I suppose that’s natural to any academic discourse). Online people are talking more and more knowledgeably about film, while delivering what they have to say increasingly visually and graphically. There is a growing part of me which wants to take the subject back up. The notion of one day doing a PhD on the subject has never really died away, but I would probably need to find some kind of local university to do it with. There is obviously a great deal more to say about the increasingly complex relationship between the two expressions of filmic love. If anyone has any advice on the subject, of course I’d welcome it.