1000 Journals

One thousand Journals seemed to continue past the realm of being entertaining. Although I really enjoyed the concept, I became bored with the film after a while. The still photography taken from the actual pages of journals were beautiful but the interviews with the characters became too much.

The concept of this documentary was extremely cool. Let some guy or rather Someguy design one thousand beautiful journals and then send them out into the world. I liked the parallels made with parenthood and the whole concept of letting go. Very Zen. What I didn’t like was that the documentary seemed to stray from this concept. The purity was completely lost. Someguy built a website and had people sign up for the journals. This is not random but controlled. It also creates a problem with characters. The people did not seem to represent anonymity but crazed journal seekers. They really freaked me out. The people that got the journals did not seem to believe in the true concept of the journals. If that is true however, then neither did the creator.

The documentary seemed contrived. All documentaries will show the filmmaker’s perspective and this requires critical thinking, but this documentary seemed to destroy the concept that it promoted. I could be wrong but I thought that the concept was designed around the idea that the journals would gain random perspectives from around the globe. As I mentioned before, the random selection did not seem so random. The documentary itself also seemed to get in the way of the original concept. The filmmaker was tracking the path of the journals and that is fine but the actual paths that the journals took were distorted. The people who received the journals played a large role in this, but the filmmaker did as well. This is unacceptable to me. I remember that the documentary showed a scene in which a journal was handed back from one person to the other to see what the other had written. That is not right. The concept is destroyed because of that. The anonymity from one person to the next is lost. From that point whole artistic statement behind the project seems false.

The characters depicted in the film also irritated me. I am not sure why those particular people were chosen but I can guess. It seemed a little less random and a little more obvious with the introduction of each new journal writer that it was not so random. They were the people that the project wanted to show. That ruined it for me. It seemed so false. I couldn’t believe it.

I think the documentary was bad but the idea was good. Maybe the idea was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I believe that the journals would have been better off in a less digitalized world. People don’t communicate the same way anymore and I think that was a point that the documentary was trying to make. I think the documentary took a wrong turn when it tried to depict the lives of the journal writers. The journals should have been more important. Like I mentioned before, the still photographs taken from the journals were beautiful.