I like movies, and feel like I haven’t seen enough, but since I also feel, at 25 26 27, like I’m very decidedly done with school, at least for a few years, I figure the closest I can get to a couple of rigorous film classes is to watch, in chronological order, every movie on an absurdly long and well-curated list that goes way back to the dawn of the craft, with A Trip to the Moon, straight up to the present day. The List I’m referring to will come from the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Schneider. There are several versions of this list. Roughly a new one gets printed every year, cutting out a handful of old films to make way for the new. In this project I’ll be using the twelfth edition (2012), for no particular reason. I didn’t go through several editions and then deem this one the best. I just ordered the book and this is what showed up.

My plan is to watch every movie on this list and write a response essay to each one. These essays will vary in length. Sometimes they’ll be about the movie in question and sometimes they’ll use the movie as a springboard to talk about other things (myself, mostly).

My hope is to publish two essays a week for about seven years. Mondays & Thursdays at 10 a.m. (EST). When the Project started I was taking it really slow, thinking I oughta play it safe and not burn myself out, but it’s been a couple years now and I’ve got as good a sense as I’ll ever have about what I’m doing here, so I’m posting about five or eight or fourteen times a week. I integrated personal diary-like posts in October 2018, so posting new content is almost more a compulsion at this point than a hobby or job.

Here’s a checklist you can use to follow along or to count how many of the 1001 movies you’ve already seen.

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