Film Club Report

Participation

Since 2020 when I started Lockdown Films and After I’ve been keeping a running total of each person’s attendances, including at the special events. This is not a detailed register of who attended each time, just a total figure for the year for each participant in the film club. I’ve listed these totals below for the first half of 2023 and for the whole of 2022 for comparison.

Notes and Comments

Attending for any part of a meeting counts as attending.

My own participation is excluded, so the number of people in each meeting altogether is one more than the average attendance shown.

From the start of 2023 I’ve introduced the alternative Saturday discussion. If you treat each pair of Thursday and Saturday discussions as one event then this year there have been 11 events so far, including the Quiz and WILTY, with an average attendance of 9.8

The four new participants this year have been a fantastic boost to the group, as well as those who have been able to attend more frequently.

While the Saturday option has increased participation altogether the average attendance has of course gone down significantly because of the spread across two meetings. I think the optimum for a lively discussion with sufficient airtime for each individual is about 6 or 7 plus myself. With just one or two more people attending each time we would achieve that on average.

Of course the films themselves need to be appealing. This is the subject of the next section.

Appraisal

The other note I’ve been making after each pair of discussions is a sense of how well or badly each film went down with the group. This is a highly subjective, rough and ready estimate. All I’m aiming for is a very vague impression of the relative popularity of each film based on what people said or wrote. Some points to note:

• There are two columns in the table below – one for my own opinion after seeing the film this time, and the other for my attempted averaging of everyone else’s opinion, which is often very different.
• The group’s opinion is based on the impression I gleaned from the discussions plus any written feedback I might have got. This average is irrespective of the size of the pool i.e. whether a small or a larger number of people watched it and gave their views.
• Positive and negative opinions of equal strength cancel each other out. So if half the people loved a film and the other half hated it then it is on a par with a film that everyone thought was just about OK.
• The lists give no indication of how good or bad the films were reckoned to be in absolute terms, only their relative rankings. My own judgements are bound to be more positive overall than the aggregate of the members, since I’ve chosen nearly all of the films from my own past favourites. However this year so far almost every film has also been generally well received by the members who discussed it. Even the bottom one in the list had its admirers.

Rank	Chris	Average of Everyone Else
1	Reservoir Dogs	Shiva Baby
2	Goodfellas	Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool
3	Annie Hall	Annie Hall
4	Woman In A Dressing Gown	Pain And Glory
5	Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool	Raise The Red Lantern
6	Lawless Heart	Wild Rose
7	The American Friend	Tea With Mussolini
8	Pain And Glory	Goodfellas
9	Raise The Red Lantern	Garden State
10	Random Harvest	Random Harvest
11	Ice Cold In Alex	Lawless Heart
12	Shiva Baby	Three Kings
13	Garden State	Reservoir Dogs
14	Inside Llewyn Davis	The American Friend
15	Three Kings	Ice Cold In Alex
16	Tea With Mussolini	Woman In A Dressing Gown
17	Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence	Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
18	Wild Rose	Inside Llewyn Davis

The films I’m lining up for the rest of the year will be at least as interesting and varied as those above.

Communication

The enforced transition from Microsoft Teams to Zoom went smoothly, and it will now be easier for any new person to join since there is no more need for a Microsoft account.

Using this WordPress platform as the information centre also has advantages. It has a simpler and more reliable notification mechanism for example. If you click on the overall site heading The Babbling Pond, and then scroll down to the bottom you can subscribe to the content. Every time I add a new post like this one, or update and re-publish The Next Two Films, you will get an email to let you know (in your Social tab if you’re on gmail or similar).

The downside is a slight loss of online ambience. On Teams everyone could post their own messages to the group or have individual chats. Use of these facilities seemed to be on the decline anyway however. And you can comment here as well. Just scroll to the bottom of any page to see this option. Please feel free to use it and get a new conversation going!