It is the special privilege of all bloggers to bore / regale / fascinate (delete as appropriate) their readers with statistics. Every blog comes with a content management system that reports the daily, weekly and monthly figures, encouraging to write ever more so that you may attain the next milestone in pursuit of a truly satisfactory popularity. The urge to report such figures to your readership is a great one, though one doubts that the readers care much at all.

Here at New Bioscope Towers we are not entirely immune to such temptations, but as the viewing figures climb steadily if unspectacularly upwards, we are less distracted by them than used to be the case (oh that happy day when we first hit 10,000 views). Nevertheless, three-quarters-of-a-million visits since 2007 feels like a modest achievement, and that’s where we are. Feel free to celebrate in whatever way you find fitting.

For myself, I shall celebrate by presenting the trailer for The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’ modern silent feature film which was such a great hit at Cannes and is about to go on general release (in October, it seems). It looks to be just the sort of fun that the best silent films can be – and a film for everyone. The Bioscope salutes it, and all those who revere a medium which clearly has much more life in it yet.