On the question of marathon viewing and what it does to your relationship with a filmmaker's work.

I have done Kurosawa in a week, Bergman in two weeks, and the Dardennes over a long weekend. The marathon viewing experience is different from watching the same films spread over a year and I want to describe what's different.

The most significant thing is the emergence of obsessions. When you watch twelve Bergman films in two weeks, you start to see the same images recurring: the face in extreme close-up, the conversation that ends in silence, the character who says exactly what they mean and the character who cannot. These obsessions are not secrets — Bergman scholarship has catalogued them thoroughly. But experiencing them sequentially rather than reading about them is different.

The second significant thing is the way early films illuminate late films. Watching Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) and then The Scenes from a Marriage (1973) twenty years later reveals the same territory from opposite shores: youthful desire and its exhaustion, the summer and what follows it.

The risk of marathon viewing is that you start to see only the obsessions and stop seeing the individual films. The discipline is to watch each film as itself while remaining aware of where it sits in the larger pattern.