Old Sight and Sounds from the dawn of a film nerd

It's a bit weird reading issues of a magazine for the first time in a quarter of a century, and it's really weird when they're the exact same copies you were actually reading, back in the day.

The absolute peak for film obsession was in my very early 20s, right in the middle of the 1990s. It was the time in life when I'd first moved out of home and to a new city and had disposable income and no girlfriend and all I wanted to do was go see the most awful rubbish multiple times at the local cinemas. I could go to any film I wanted, and usually did.

And since the internet wasn't quite a thing yet, I also read everything I could get my hands on about the movies. I started getting Empire magazines (and never stopped), and half the books I got out from the library were full-on film theory. And I also had access to my flatmate Karen's Sight and Sounds magazines, which were stacked with film knowledge and lore.

I knew the magazine had been around decades already from that point, but I've rarely seen any issues older than these (although recent issues have been diving back into the stacks for some killer content from its early days). All I know is that those magazines were a vital part of my self-taught film nerd education, giving glimpses into perspectives beyond the multiplex, into all kinds of film and stories.

I loved those magazines, but Karen moved out of the flat and I moved away a couple of years later and I didn't see them again for decades, until I heard there was a guy in my city who had swapped those exact same issues with her for something years ago, and was now looking to offload them on some poor sucker. He turned out to be a deadset Aotearoa music legend, which was nice, and when he gave them to me, I promised to give them a good home.

It's the covers that hit hardest. Fuck, they're good looking magazines, with dynamic cover design and an ultra-dense level of text rarely seen in mainstream publications anymore. They all date from that small golden age of 90s films, when Heat and Pulp fiction and Trainspotting and Fargo were all coming out, and the power of cinema was simply intoxicating.

The synopsis boxes are a lot bigger and the magazine sometimes gets very excited about auteurs who nobody remembers anymore (usually because they don't out to be fuckheads who nobody wanted to work with anymore), but these things are packed with information. And while I've read it before, I'm old and don't remember any of it outside the covers and the occasional Tarantino quote.

There's dozens of issues and it's going to take me months to go through them again, but that's okay. It took that long, the first time around.