I am old enough to remember the time when blogs became a thing. Hell, I am old enough to recollect that brief and blissful moment in the history of The Internet when everyone had their homepage, the vast majority of which featured jazzy colours, images concocted in Microsoft Paint, WordArt logos, and at least one use of the Comic Sans font. I suppose what I am inadvertently saying here is that I am older than I would like to admit, but that’s neither here nor there.  

In all seriousness, what I am trying to convey is a certain kind of nostalgia for the times gone by because nowadays blogs – as I have come to know them – are more or less extinct or completely excised from the epidermis of online presence. Blogs have evolved into independent publications with aspirations to self-promotion and a veneer of professionalism, while the more personal aspect of interactions with the outside world blogging provided in its infancy has been ceded onto social media where we are asked to either communicate our opinions to closed groups of acquaintances or to condense them into digestible bullets of 280 characters or less and effectively shout at clouds. And I don’t know what to feel about it because it seems what I need to express myself online in a way that is acceptable and interesting to me involves doing something that nobody in their right mind seems to be doing these days – typing paragraphs of verbiage about what I think and posting them somewhere on The Internet for others to see.  

Which brings me to explain the purpose of all this. Flasz On Film is not a publication, but rather an attempt to bring everything I do in the sphere of writing about cinema under one roof. For lack of a better word, it is a personal platform. I have consistently rambled on Letterboxd for a number of years now whilst kidding myself it was that kind of platform where writers could express themselves; it really isn’t. It is at best an amplifier and at worst a cesspool of memes and reactionary one-liners posted by wannabe media influencers where any genuine thought drowns in the ocean of self-aggrandizing desire to go viral, rarely to be seen or read. I don’t quite know how I will go about moving all my reviews into a form of a bespoke archive and even when I do figure it out, it might take me ages to reduce it to practice, so for the time being you can always find my past ramblings on my LB profile, but going forward, all my film writing that doesn’t end up published externally (most likely on CLAPPER) is going to be found in here.  

This is where I think I will be able to dump my reviews, continue and embark on all my marathons, retrospectives and rant from a sedentary position about everything else that doesn’t fit within the parameters of a review or a standalone feature article. I don’t quite have an idea how this will translate to practice, but if you like my writing, appreciate my perspective on things, or even if you disagree with my takes and opinions, this is the place you can interact with me in ways that Twitter just is not capable of supporting.  

“Never in history have so many with so little to say said so much to so few.” This paraphrasing of Winston Churchill’s famous words is how someone I personally admire once summed up the notion of blogging. It has stuck with me and perhaps kept discouraging me from doing this because any creative enterprise is on some level tethered to an audience, even if chances of this being seen by anyone are slim to none. But then again, I don’t see writing and opining on cinema as a career I am desperate to have. I write because I can’t help myself; this is a calling. I guess, what I am trying to say is “Hello and welcome to my new home. Forgive me the walls are bare and it’s pretty sparse for now, but all my stuff is still in boxes and I am still in the process of putting the figurative IKEA furniture together. What I can do is offer you a cup of tea and something to read, if you bear with me.” 

Yours Truly,
Jakub, founder of FlaszOnFilm.com