I have over 500 movies on DVD. That’s not unique and certainly nowhere near a record. I ran out of shelf space years ago and now the bulk of my movies resides in a large DVD case that sits unobtrusively on the floor.

The upshot of this is I’ve had to reorganize my DVD collection. I use one method for the DVD case and a wholly different one for the few that remain on my shelf (my extra-special-close-to-my-heart-collector’s-edition-favorites… and what-not).

In the early years of movie organization, I hit upon a method that vexed Kym (my oh-so-patient wife) to no end until the shelf-space diminution. She, of course, preferred the conventional system of alphabetization. I wouldn’t hear of sullying my cherished cinema stockpile with so mundane an arrangement. That wasn’t the only reason, however.

To understand my index structure perhaps I should explain one of my (many) idiosyncrasies. This requires a bit of history. One that begins Anno Domini nineteen-hundred and eighty-six in the month of November, mere days before the release of Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales. That was the year I started working at the local cinema in my hometown. From that point on, dates would never be the same.

Working at the cinema, I became something of a whiz at identifying dates (a colleague at work recently dubbed me a “calendar-savant”). I always knew what was the date based on the release of a particular film. Since movies habitually started on Friday, I always knew what was Friday’s movie release. Based on that, it was easy to extrapolate dates for the rest of the week. Eventually, I honed my technique such that if I knew the first Friday of the month was the 1st, then those that succeeded would be the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th. It got so all I had to know was one Friday date per month to extract any date for that month.

You follow?

At any rate, there came a point in my life when I started to accumulate movies on VHS. These film favorites slowly filled my bookcase and it soon became apparent that they would have to be organized in some fashion. The solution was manifest… sort them by release date.

To me it made the most sense. Movies are history as well as art and entertainment. In cataloging my collection in order of their release, I was able to see, at a glance, the history of my life unfold across the wall. It was also much easier for me to find a movie as my movie mood is frequently dependent upon what is the time of year.

Certain problems in categorization presented, though, in that movie series would not be grouped together. The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan would all be sitting pretty in roughly the same area: 1980, 1981 and 1982 respectively; while their brethren would be elsewhere. Star Wars would be all alone in 1977, while Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade would be waaayyy over in 1989, and the remaining Star Trek movies would be all over the wall. Forget about the James Bond movies, there was never any hope there.

It’s a bit of mental depravity I call “nostalgia neurosis” (okay, I just made up that term just now). Certain movies evoke certain emotional responses, and those responses are often tied to when I first saw the movie in question. For example, I have trouble watching any of the Indiana Jones movies in any season other than summer. This obsession becomes more twisted when dealing with long-running series like Star Trek and the James Bond movies. Star Treks II, III & V, and the recent reboot were released in the summer, whereas the others were unveiled in the winter movie season. Similarly, the various James Bond movies debuted all over the calendar. So, certain of these movies are best watched in certain seasons.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I can’t get into Road to Perdition in the summer as it is so bleak and dismal. Similarly, I find it difficult to watch any of the Harry Potter movies at any time other than winter, with the exception of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban, which is the perfect Potter picture for Halloween. That festive holiday pretty much destroys any month but October for horror films. So movies released in the summer like Fright Night, The Lost Boys and Van Helsing (shut up) inevitably find their way to to the fall season. The same goes for November fare like Interview with the Vampire and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Whatever time of year the classic Universal monster movies were unleashed is rendered wholly irrelevant on two fronts: A) They’re just naturals for Halloween; and B) They were released long before my oldest sibling was born.

At one time this seasonal-obsessive-disorder (SOD) led me to experiment with an even more baffling system. This organize-by-season method allowed me, at a glance, to select a movie that perfectly fit the correlating season. To fine-hone this technique, I had to divide the four seasons into five (based on how the movie industry tends to perceive it). January through February was dedicated to late-winter movies. March and April made up spring. May through August is the longest stretch, traditionally encapsulating the summer movie season. September and October comprised fall, leaving November and December to define the early winter season. Organizing over 100 movies into five categories based on season soon became problematic, however. For example, some movies have a tendency to bleed over from April into May, spring into summer. You may argue that I could simply have put those movies in between the seasonal-sections. However, once the movies were separated into the their respective categories, they had to be sub-categorized again by month then by year. You can see how this was an inefficient system.

That Kym didn’t murder me is testimony to the woman’s self-restraint.

Organizing by release year was more than just an experiment in wallowing in sentimentality. It was also a very effective way to take a snapshot of film history itself. Look, up there in the left hand corner. There’s The Phantom of the Opera. Why this whole top row is black and white classics. What’s this section beneath? Is that The Adventures of Robin Hood? Technicolor is born. There’s Once Upon a Time in the West ushering out the old Western and shepherding in the post-Hays Code 70s. What’s new, you ask? Why just start from the bottom-right and work your way back. It’s a movie collection and a timeline.

This worked until Kym insisted upon having a section devoted specifically to “her” movies. Although why When Harry Met Sally…, Roxanne and the entire Disney collection should belong to her is a bit of a mystery. I’d like to add that her section, small as it may have been, was never organized in any fashion… ahem.

When the Great Shelf-Space Purge occurred, and the wall was no longer the glorious timeline of its heyday, I acquiesced and organized my titles alphabetically. In my mind, this did not improve anything. First off, I couldn’t find the movies for which I was looking at any given moment. Unaccustomed as I was to the rather random sequence of movies across the shelves, my collection seemed to be stripped of its very soul. Now it sits there like the possessions of a deceased relic, as if waiting to be auctioned off to someone with less affinity for the complexities of creative cataloging.

The alphabet does not always provide the best organization anyway. The Mask of Zorro was released eight years prior to The Legend of Zorro, yet the two must be reversed in an alphabetical system. What is one to do with the ridiculous incongruity of First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II? Not to mention the orphaned Indiana Jones movies that followed Raiders of the Lost Ark (though, paradoxically, they would come first on the shelves). This again presents problems with the James Bond series. Do I split them up? File them under 007? File them under J or B? Needless to say, this is not the best system for all movies.

I did not wholly abandon my SOD system. It’s the system I use for the DVD case. I also sub-categorize by number of movies in a particular series. It’s messy and it’s boring, but keeping a DVD case up-to-date with any kind of system is trouble enough. Rearranging the discs in the sleeves is daunting, to say the least.

I miss the visual artistry and historical flow of my timeline video system. Now it’s like the ancient ruins of a lost civilization.