By Roderick Heath

Long ago, in the dimly-remembered time of legend and chivalry that was 2006, my friend Marilyn Ferdinand asked me if I wanted to contribute to her new project, the blog she’d started to get the word out on some of the more obscure but worthy movies she liked to watch, ill-served by mainstream portals of film discussion. It was the sort of partnership the internet was made for, two people on different continents united by a common interest. Within a few years the late, great Roger Ebert would succinctly note that we put a lot of love into our site, and if anything that was an understatement. Ferdy on Films soon grew into a grand personal project into which we ploughed vast amounts of time and energy, but which gave back the special thrill of garnering a wide and appreciative readership for a very long time, and entered the lively and enormously entertaining fellowship of fellow movie lovers and writers.

The internet is often considered innately hostile to longevity, and eventually we found ourselves with a strange status, august and venerable without any of the positives usually endowed by such doddering eminence. Film writing online quite often feels today like a Sisyphean task. When we started, a lively film culture sparked by the DVD era was in full flower. Now, the delivery system is becoming increasingly tunnelvisioned as the once-promising but now too often hermetic, neglectful, past-erasing mode of streaming dominates. This, plus a general wane in blogging, has made reaching a more fragmented and distracted audience much harder. The real world has its way of corroding all idylls, and the world has been very real of late. Still, of course, you can’t be too solemn when it comes to online life. Not when our most popular post ever remains Marilyn’s look at The Notorious Bettie Page, beloved by visitors I suspect not only for Marilyn’s perspicacious writing or interest in indie film.

Over the years we had some great and consequential experiences. Marilyn’s role in founding and overseeing the Film Preservation Blogathons was responsible for bringing together film lovers from every corner of the online world and helped give some long-lost movies back to us, whilst her reports on film festivals quite often provided some of the only substantial commentary for the interested to consult for a raft of independent and non-English language cinema, zones which seem to be becoming all the more obscure and hard to penetrate for current movie lovers. I’ve had essays taught in college classes and seen quotes from some of my reviews used to plug revival screenings, something I never expected, and I think back with great pleasure to moments where we really connected with readers, like the appreciation my look at the Star Wars prequels gained from those films’ long-sidelined fans.

But now it’s all over. At least, in one form. The Ferdy on Films site will no longer be updated. The specific question of how we’ll keep this body of work online as a permanent archive is still to be solved, but that’s still our fervent intention. You’ll still be able to catch Marilyn’s writing at the site and at , whilst I founded the new long-form criticism site earlier this year, to sustain this site’s spirit and method. I hope very much that you’ll transfer some of your affection to these sites just as you’ve visited this one over the years.

Thank you, Marilyn, for making it possible. My fondest best wishes for the future, and goodbye for now, all.

— Rod