Last Friday, March 18th, when I looked at the TCM schedule, I was reminded how many movies there are out there and how few any of us has really seen. Much of the time I look at the TCM schedule and can honestly say I’ve seen at least half of what’s on that day. The other half I may not have seen but I’m completely familiar with them and may have even seen a few scenes. There are other days when I have seen literally every movie on the schedule for that day. Big classic movies that we’ve all seen, say, during the 31 Days of Oscar. And then, on days like last Friday, I look at the schedule and think, “Wow, I’ve only seen two!” Those two were A Song to Remember and That Uncertain Feeling. Of those on the schedule that I hadn’t seen? Well, there was Wide Open, But the Flesh is Weak, Lonely Wives, Roar of the Dragon, Sing and Like It, Smarty, The Night is Young, Young Man with Ideas, Gypsy Colt, Moonfleet, and First Comes Courage. I have not seen a one of them. And why should I have anyway? Do have any idea how many movies have been made?!
If I do a quick check of my late 1980′s reference guide on movies put out by the Guinness World Records team (it’s nothing but 236 pages of facts and figures from the beginning of cinema up through its publication date in 1988) I see that the United States released 852 movies in 1921. Movies were huge business in 1921 and most of those ran from 20 to 60 minutes with a couple of hundred running more towards what we would consider feature length today. Well, how many of those have I seen? There’s Orphans of the Storm, directed by D.W. Griffith. I’ve seen Little Lord Fauntleroy with Mary Pickford. I have also watched the great short film (about 10 minutes long) Soul of the Cypress, directed by Dudley Murphy who is the director of one of the films on the schedule today that I haven’t seen, The Night is Young. Soul of the Cypress is readily available online and tells the brief story of a musician on the northern coast of California whose playing brings a tree nymph to life. It’s actually quite well photographed and provides impetus to watch The Night is Young.
But back to 1921. There’s The Kid, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, and The Phantom Carriage, but that’s a Swedish production, not an American one. Oh, and The Sheik. And… I think that’s it. Not bad, I guess. That’s one foreign film and six American films out of thousands. 852 from America and at least several hundred from everyone else combined if not many, many more. By the thirties, there are thousands of films from all countries combined being produced every year. If you slept 8 hours a day and spent 16 hours watching nothing but movies, averaging two hours a piece, you would see eight movies a day. Do this 365 days a year for 50 years and you would have seen 146,000 movies. And if there is anyone alive who has spent every single day for fifty years doing nothing for 16 hours every day watching movies, I’d like to meet that strange and wonderful person. I imagine they would a tad on the socially awkward side but a world class expert on the language of cinema. And guess what? That person, whoever they are, has barely seen anything.
If you like, you can go here and look at each country’s cinema output. If you click here for instance, it will take you to the entry on the cinema of China and let you know they made 614 feature films in 2014. Tunisia and Armenia, on the other hand, made only four and five. Other countries make more, like India which made 1,969 in 2015, and a few make only one. According to Unesco figures on world cinema, a little over 8,000 fictional feature length titles were made in 2013 (the last year of full stats for this) alone. When documentaries, short films, both animated and live-action, and television movies are factored in, then averaged out to about 12,000 pieces of product a year over the last sixty years, taking us back to the late fifties when almost everyone had gotten into the act of movie making, you come to a figure of 760,000 and that’s ignoring the previous 80 years of movie making. Add that in and we’re in the millions. So that 146,000 movies is but a fraction of the total number that have been made. And that means the chance that any of us could ever even approach seeing every movie ever made that hasn’t been lost and is available for viewing is non-existent.
So how do we know what to watch?
Well, we don’t. We think we do but we don’t. We know there are big movies, famous movies, classic movies that everyone has to see but which aren’t always seen. We don’t like to admit it but each of us has more than a handful of hugely famous classic movies that we still haven’t seen. And we haven’t seen them because we have lives that we need to live, jobs we need to go to, schools we have to attend, and people we need and want to see and be with and enjoy. I’ve seen a few thousand movies by my best estimate and I’ll only ever see a few thousand more if I’m lucky. Sometimes I’ll make a good choice and be pleased, other times I wonder why I wasted my time on a movie I’ll never want to watch again. And even after taking in multiple movies I felt were mistakes, there will still be classic movies that I still haven’t seen. That’s the way of the world even if it is a little hard to accept. Every now and then, like last Friday, I see a schedule that reminds me there are more movies out there than I know what to do with. I can’t watch them all. I can only pick and choose. I may choose that Dudley Murphy movie someday, or maybe I’ll just watch Soul of the Cypress again. Who knows. I can’t watch them all but I’ll watch what I can and be happy with it. It’s not often the world presents us with a bounty of riches. I’m thankful for the bounty of cinema that we have.