If you only see one film at MIFF

...for the love of God, see this.

Jelly Hands is threatening to review it on her newly established blog, so I won't write it up, only mention that it ticks every box you could possibly expect and then some. Awesome. Come to think of it, it's possible a review of it might pop up here...

I've often wondered about the overlapping communities that exist, those on the net and those in the physical world (my first impulse being to write "in real life", but then it's all real life). Often reading blogs seems to be a matter of teasing out networks, deciphering the friendships and tensions that exist between writers in the physical world. Certain people whose blogs I read I see at launches, or get a drink with occasionally, and often I'm conscious of a disparity between the way I perceive people through their writing and how I react to them in conversation.

Occasionally it feels uncomfortably voyeuristic, knowing the intimate details of someone's life while preserving a distinctly formal relationship with them. It can feel as though you've caught someone undressing by mistake, or overheard them crying in the bathroom, and neither of you want to mention it. Occasionally it breaks the ice. Occasionally, people I didn't realise read my own writing comment on it in passing and I have a moment of panic, scouring my brain desperately to see if I've posted anything too revealing, or improper, or careless.

By the same token, I often wonder how the relationships formed over the internet would work out face to face - whether the people I meet and form word-crushes on would be people I could strike up conversation with in a bar or chat to on the tram. Whether flirting would translate into actual sexual chemistry.

Anyway, despite the occasional coffee with bloggers and the like, I've always felt apart from the main Melbourne blogger networks. Now that Jelly and Jono are writing the two spheres have collapsed somewhat, and I'm trying to dredge up as much Habermas as I can remember to try to make sense of it. Rigid separation of the public and private sphere has always been complicated by confessional literature and the like, but the internet, God bless it, has made the notion seem quaintly obsolete. Sometimes the privacy implications make me nervous. Unreasonably so.

On the other hand, I'm increasingly fascinated by the idea of the internet as a repository of memory, and the collective impulse to spew photos, jokes and journal entries into perpetuity. And since the three of us spend so much time together, it will be interesting to see how we each interpret events - the things we deem worthy of writing about, or how we write about them - and how much we can track our own lives by each other's writing.

Hmm. This is a very confused and meandering post. I'll refrain from babbling on about identity construction through the written word and the subjective memory and the confessional lived experience because I suspect I don't really know what I'm talking about, anyway. But hey!

If you only read one ostensible review of a MIFF film that takes a sharp detour into a ploddingly meta examination of the internet-mediated identity...