Counting Films

How many films have you seen?

That’s not a question I’ve ever pondered before. But it came up in conversation earlier this week when a friend was telling me about Listal. A new web site that he had been playing with.

Listal is aimed at the High Fidelity geek audience. It’s a web site for making lists. My friend had been making a list of all of the films he had seen and had very quickly found himself with a list of over 600 films.

That sounded in the right sort of area to me. If we assume that I watch on average one new film a week and that I’ve been doing that for twenty years or so then I’ll have seen about a thousand films. But how many of them can I remember?

So I joined up and over the last few days I’ve been building my own list of films that I’ve seen. It actually turns out to be a) pretty easy and b) very interesting. I’ve also got to over 600 films (is there some psychological limit there – humans find it easy to remember the titles of 600 films?) and with such a large data set interesting patterns emerge. You can find the actor you’ve seen most often (Ian Holm apparently) and the director whose films you’ve seen most of (Spielberg – which I found quite surprising).

So feel free to laugh at my taste in films. But why not build your own list and let me laugh at yours in exchange.

Oh, and if I’ve mentioned seeing any films that aren’t yet on my list then please let me know.