We’re living in the age of curated streaming services and neighborhood arthouse cinemas. We want special. We want underground. We want gatekeep. We want director’s cut. We want 35mm. We want to be tastemakers. For the blissfully self-aware, there’s Letterboxd.

A Film Kid’s Fantasy

I recently ran into an old acquaintance who I hadn’t seen in nearly a year. We had the usual catch-up - how’s work? Ah, sorry you guys broke up? Wait - you liked that movie? Before I could catch myself, I blurted “Do you have Letterboxd?” He laughed, telling me that I had in fact introduced him to it when we first met. Of course.

Letterboxd, a “social platform for sharing your taste in film”, has skyrocketed in popularity recently. Launched in 2011, the site (and now mobile app) has gone through a few developments to reach its current iteration. Originally private, it opened to the public in 2013 and began offering organization/company based profiles in 2020. Users can log films they’ve watched, rate them and write reviews. You can keep track of movies you’re planning on viewing and organize them into lists. Letterboxd even has their own online magazine, Journal, featuring interviews with industry names, essays and film trend reports, amongst a plethora of other offerings and even a podcast (yes, we’re still living in the podcast age).

Formerly a niche Goodreads-for-film for the insufferable cinephile you sat beside in Textual Analysis, Letterboxd has extended beyond itself, now boasting an Instagram following of nearly half-a-million and even their own Criterion Closet visit (usually reserved for geriatric auteurs of yore). As zillennials cling to their cassette tapes and MUBI subscriptions, a new form of tastemaking and social hierarchy has emerged in the artsy crowd. Twitter has fallen off, leading to the exodus of snappy one-liners from one platform to another. Here lies Film Boi Twitter 2006-2022. Letterboxd provides a safe haven for those with “unconventional” tastes and an ironic distance to the Hollywood blockbusters they diligently watch. It’s a space to go full film bro analysis or write the wittiest quip about whatever Taika Waititi Marvel mess has been released.

Letterboxd’s Influence

Henry Jenkins coined the concept of “convergence culture”, which he describes as a combination of “media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence”. He explains that “By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.” Interestingly, he notes that “Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms.” Nowhere else is this made more clearly than the Letterboxd annual Year in Review. For 2022, Letterboxd announced that over 227 million film ratings were submitted, culminating in Everything Everywhere All at Once being the highest rated of the year and the most popular film that April. Included in the roundup is also a ranking of the most popular reviews and lists by site members. Michelle Yeoh, Top Gun: Maverick and a cynical zillenial’s take on a Godard retrospective stand shoulder to shoulder on Letterboxd. Where else can you find that relative democratization of film criticism and consumerism?

One of my favourite reviews of horror classic Rosemary’s Baby. Screenshot of Ava’s review on Letterboxd.

Letterboxd’s influence is similar to that of Perfectly Imperfect, a newsletter that describes itself as a “cultural time capsule of interesting individuals and what they’re into”, and the proliferation of film clubs for teens and twentysomethings. It’s a glimpse into the notion of taste as central to our understanding of ourselves and others. Who are we but a muddle of the media we watch, quote, spend money on, emulate and think about everyday? And could I ever be friends with, god forbid DATE, someone who genuinely liked Christopher Nolan’s Tenet? That's a rhetorical question, shut up.

The Return of “Cinephilia”?

Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1996 essay The Decay of Cinema, that “Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -- the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special [...] Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.”

She goes further to say that “you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films”. Letterboxd feels like a foray back to the cinephilia that Sontag writes of. Cinephilia has morphed to suit our digital age as a source of cultural cachet. Back in the 90s it was check out my sweet VHS collection. Now that curated collection is available at the touch of a button, packaged up neatly within an even more sleek design - making it a favourite for college kids and companies alike. It lends itself perfectly to the influx of branding that straddles the line between personal and professional, as companies hand their business accounts to tuned-in interns with a knack for internet jargon and Ari Aster screen caps.

This is all to say that Letterboxd, despite its decade long existence, feels like a social media platform that has adjusted itself to our generation. It’s taken the best from Twitter, Goodreads, The Current and chucked it into something that has a sensibility of the here and now. It welcomes the intellectuals, the wits and the memers equally with open arms, expanding our understanding of what film criticism and cinephilia for the self-aware can be. Did you log Beau is Afraid yet?

Purveyors of Taste: The Letterboxd Generation