The Dancing Image Past, Present, Future

This weekend I made some changes to the sidebar and several pages of The Dancing Image. I'm using this as an opportunity to offer up a springtime update, including future plans but starting with the recent changes I made.

Every week month, at the top of the sidebar, I will be highlighting a different one of my own "top posts" (by my estimation, not anyone else's), with a picture, a quote, and a link. Today it's Cities of the Imagination from last summer, a reflection on the cinematic and psychological aspects of city-dreams and dream-cities. It spurred an interesting discussion and includes lots of great screen-caps from the film The World and several of Michel Gondry's music videos.

The sidebar also includes slideshows featuring pictures from two of my series: one on Wind in the Willows, the other on "Twin Peaks". I have also updated the Main Directory and the Remembering the Movies directory. Both now include letter-headers for easier navigation, as well as many more pictures to liven things up.

Obviously the idea here is to bring the archives to newer readers; I've always felt that novelty is a pretty crappy indicator of quality, and that the tendency of blogs to highlight the most recent at the expense of the best is unfortunate.

And especially now at a time when my blogging is perfunctory at best (other than "Remembering the Movies," I'm hardly posting anything new) it seems like a good idea to highlight past work that might have been missed the first time. My audience has only been growing in the past few months, probably based on people googling images I'm using but I want to give them more to stick around for.

Anyway, I do still want to pick up the pace eventually. My personal and professional life is still very busy, and my interest in films and blogging has waned but that happens periodically. What I'm hoping to do eventually is write a series of posts, hold off on publishing them, and then put them up all at  once, much as I did last fall - except this time I won't be burning the midnight oil to play catch-up.

Possible options would include a return to the Monday wild card and the Thursday visual tribute, with a Beatles-on-Film series every Tuesday and a formal analysis of a sequence or film, with pictures and possibly video, every Wednesday. Such a schedule might run for six weeks or so before things quieted down again.

I do have one idea for a fresh piece, and hopefully it will pop up before May. Other than that "Remembering the Movies" will continue and the backlog will remain ever-open and increasingly available for those interested in checking it out.