New Address, Same Siren

From 2005 to this year, my blog, Self-Styled Siren, chronicled my cinema obsessions. For the past seven years or so, posts at the blog have dwindled as paid work took up most of my scarce writing time. I’ve written things for Criterion, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, RogerEbert.com, TIFF online, Barron's Magazine, The Baffler, The New York Post, and The New York Times. In 2014 I also published a novel, Missing Reels.

Happily, these days I have more time to write for myself again, aided (or so I ardently hope) by an accumulated backlog of ideas. I plan no grand change of subject. I’ll write about old movies and the people who made them, with occasional thoughts on current film matters. If you liked the old blog, the plan is to make the substack more of the same. 

There will always be free posts, but I have plans for some longer pieces that eventually will appear behind a paywall due to the extra work of researching and writing them. I’ll hold back on paywalled posts for a while, to let people decide if they’d like to contribute. After that, there will be a mix of free and paywalled writing. Similarly, comments will be open at first, but eventually limited to subscribers. (The comment rules will be the same as always; be polite, and don’t diss Citizen Kane.) I also plan to run a handful of my older essays that are essentially out of print (and were available only to a small audience in the first place). Those re-runs will never be paywalled. 

Any contribution, now or later, will help me continue to write about the regrettably uncommercial stuff I’ve always written about chez Siren.

Where else can you find me?

I’m on Twitter @selfstyledsiren; also on Instagram and Facebook.

The original Self-Styled Siren blog abides here. My novel can be purchased here.

Thanks for reading Self-Styled Siren! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Praise From the Past

"...The rare bird who calls herself Self-Styled Siren adds fine judgment and a fluent conversational prose style to her daunting store of information." — Clive James

"Our favorite film blogger." —Lance Mannion

"Sophisticated and yet not stuck-up about it." —James Wolcott

"The blog I’d point to if I were asked to justify blogs—movie blogs or blogs in general." —Glenn Kenny

"One of the best and most knowledgeable movie bloggers out there." —Lou Lumenick

Subscribe to Self-Styled Siren

The musings of an old-movie lover

People

The continuing adventures of Self-Styled Siren, aka Farran Smith Nehme. Film critic, film lover, erstwhile “cult blogger.” Focuses on pre-1960 cinema but isn’t high-hat about it.