Life Goes On (Without Me).

Americans have no manners. Even with the biggest film festival in North America about to start only three hours away, we still can’t resist making everything about us. So rather than close down Rochester’s cultural offerings for 10 days – which would really be the decent thing to do – I’m going to miss a whole bunch of amazing Rochester stuff while in the Great White North. Here are the top seven:

1. The Clothesline Art Festival at the Memorial Art Gallery. If you’ve never gone, check out Clothesline – you’ll be hooked. (Get it?)
2. The opening of Contagion by Steven Soderbergh (also opening in an IMAX version, which bothers me a little bit) and Warrior, with gonna-be-a-big-star-any-minute-now Tom Hardy. (You’d be surprised how invisible new releases become during TIFF.)
3. The Image/OUT Festival Fair, an event at the Planetarium that presages Rochester’s upcoming gay & lesbian film festival.
4. The brilliant zombie satire Shaun of the Dead and Tex Avery shorts at the Dryden Theatre this weekend.
5. The RIT Big Shot: Painting with Light, an original documentary about an amazing photo project, premiering at 8pm Thursday on WXXI. Yeah, it’ll be on again. But still.
6. The intriguing doc Gasland over at the Little Theatre for one night only on Thursday, Sept. 8; and Miranda July’s The Future, opening for a regular run the following day.
7. Terry and Jones. (What? It’s my blog, and I’ll miss them. What of it?)

Take Two.

Why Rochester Film Journal?

Because Rochester is my home, and probably always will be. Because this city and its surroundings deserve to be specifically lauded as the birthplace (literal or otherwise) of film; and because movies – as modern society’s still reigning form of popular art – can endure another collection of unsolicited opinions from the digital peanut gallery.

And, uh … because I bought the name two years ago, and it still works.

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You can read more about me elsewhere on this site, if that’s your idea of a good time, but in a nutshell: My name is Erich Van Dussen. I’ve lived in and around Rochester, NY, for most of my life. I love movies and I love writing, and for most of my adult life I’ve been lucky to have opportunities to combine those two passions in one form or another. Along the way, I began to figure out how to really do what I’d been trying to do all along – take all those wonky ruminations about film that were filling my skull, and make sense of them with words on a page.

Volume 1 of this enterprise began two years ago, after I lost my dependable weekly column (after over a decade) with a local newspaper chain. In response, I tried too hard, came up with an online magazine format that was simply unsustainable for one person with an unrelated full-time job and a home life, and watched that format collapse within a year.

This will be different. For one thing, I don’t have time to pretend to be a magazine editor, so I’m going to concentrate on writing, not format. When something occurs to me – about a new release, or an old movie, or a trend that bears mentioning – I’m going to post it. I’m not going to hold reviews until their yeasty goodness has allowed them to expand in my mind to some arbitrary vision of what a “full-length” column should be. (Besides: movies are supposed to be fun. Blogs about movies should be, too.)

For another, I have more things to write about now than ever. Earlier this month I was invited to join the team of 360|365 – Rochester’s premier annual film festival – as a programmer. This is an incredible honor, not least because my name was offered to the festival organizers by Jack Garner, the dean of Rochester’s film community and the fest’s last programmer. I have big shoes to fill. (Seriously; Jack is a giant of a man.) I’ve covered film festivals before, but I’ve never helped program one, and I intend to share that new experience here.

I won’t commit to a regular posting schedule; but I’m going to stick with this, and I hope you’ll stick with me. Thanks for reading.