20 years of writing online
On 22 February 2005, I wrote my first blog post. It was about Sideways (2004), the film by Alexander Payne where Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church travel through California’s wine district, and what I felt was an interesting new development in Hollywood. It was inevitable that I would have a blog, and that it would be about film, and once I started writing online I have just continued, year after year. Many years I wrote a new post every week (however did I manage that?), but the last few years it has been more like one article per month.1
I first wrote in Swedish, but switched to English when I moved to Scotland in 2009, and have kept my online writing in English since, regardless of where I live. The first one in English was about Meet Me in St Louis (1944). Then I switched to Substack in 2022.
To write is something I have to do. I do it all the time, privately and publicly, and about all kinds of topics, fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry as well as prose. Films is just the most common of my subjects since the world of cinema is where I spend most of my time. Since I read, watch, and think so much about films and film-related things I have always had a desire to communicate with the world about what I have discovered. As I am a film historian, that is my usual angle, but I also write about film criticism, academia, film theory, and film technology. My most read article so far is, I think, about Robert Warshow’s essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” I do not know why it is the most read, but maybe it has been assigned as required reading somewhere. (Read it here.)
I have also written a large amount of profiles of directors. Over 80, published in many different places, in different languages, and in varying depth and thoroughness, from a book-length study of Hasse Ekman to a short appreciation of Norah Ephron. Ekman, Ingmar Bergman, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, and Henry Hathaway are probably the directors I have written about the most. At some point I should make a list of all these profiles and analyses, with information of where they can be read.
But not now. Today’s post is just me celebrating my 20th birthday as a self-published online writer. Thanks for reading me.
I also write elsewhere, books, print journals and other publications, and I have been doing so for much longer, since 1997. But self-publishing is more fun, without editorial oversight.