Forty-five films into my Criterion challenge and I want to report on what watching this many films with this kind of intentionality has done to how I watch.

The most significant change is that I now watch the first ten minutes of a film with much more attention to what the film is teaching me about how to watch it. Every film has a grammar and the opening sequences are where that grammar is established.

The second change is that I'm less tolerant of waste. A wasted scene — a scene that could be cut without losing anything — now registers as a failure of editorial discipline rather than just a slow spot.

The third change is that I've stopped using 'confusing' as a description of films I don't understand. If a film is confusing me, that's information about my preparation, not the film's quality. Bergman wasn't confused about what he was doing. I was confused about what I was watching. Those are different problems.

I have sixty-five films left in my challenge and I am genuinely not sure I'm ready for Jeanne Dielman.