The Making of a Cinephile
The getting of wisdom...
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Mea culpa: My sincere apologies for the unexpected delay in publishing. I hope you will find that it was worth the wait.
I.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cinephilia lately. Since the age of fourteen, I’ve been caught in an unceasing pursuit of cinema: chasing it, seeing it, knowing it, and loving it.
In my life, the love of cinema has been a constant companion and consolation. It has been a window into mysteries of life and existence, and it has propelled me into intellectual pursuits with abandon. It has been both a vehicle and a venue for some of my most cherished friendships. Loving cinema has taught me lessons in patience and perseverance; in fact, I believe that the discipline instilled by watching slower films, in an oblique way, prepared me for the liturgical rhythms of what would become the greatest gift of my life: receiving Jesus Christ through the Catholic Church.
My love for cinema has also often been an untimely distraction, and an occasion of sin. I’ve sometimes loved cinema more than people, and loved people for the sake of cinema. I’ve loved cinema for more than it can offer, while grudgingly offering God and my loved ones what is due. In many ways, I write from a cinephilia which has been shipwrecked and washed ashore; it is wounded and bewildered.
All of which is to say: more and more I am experiencing the reality that cinephilia is necessarily the province of a person. It is in this mode that I have most keenly experienced it these last several years: as something emanating from the heart and soul of a thinking, feeling, and loving human being, and subject to the same passions, vicissitudes, and temptations. There was a time when my cinephilia knew only rejoicing and novelty and every encounter brought a new measure of joy. In recent years, it’s become bruised and bored. Through all of this, it has become eminently clear that as much as cinephilia bears the potential to become a noble love, a love truly worthy of the name of philia, it also holds the potential to fall into disarray and dissolution. And if I am honest with myself, over the last decade my cinephilia has tended more toward the latter than the former.
For these reasons, and more, I wish to study cinephilia’s relation to the soul, and its relation to the world. Embedded within those relations are certain conflicts which make up the day to day churn of a cinephile’s life: passion against reason, affection against authority, taste against canon, and pleasure against ethics. Must these things be opposed? What would they look like in a balanced human life? After all, cinephilia is one more human activity, and like any activity we undertake, it has the power to assist or to obstruct our flourishing. How does pursuing it intentionally and passionately add to the richness of human life? What is the practical wisdom necessary for a life of cinephilia?
My love for cinema is in need of examination. It’s time for a reckoning.
What does it really mean to love cinema?
II.
In a 1980 address titled “The Philosophical Importance of Doing One’s Autobiography,” the late Thomist philosopher W. Norris Clarke laid out an intriguing challenge for his listeners. He wrote:
“Why is it so important to do one’s own autobiography? The answer lies in what it means to be a person in the peculiarly human mode. To be is to be one, as Saint Thomas and indeed all great metaphysicians tell us. And to be a person, he tells us again in what I consider one of the simplest and deepest of all definitions of the person, is to take conscious self-possession of one’s own being, to be master of oneself (dominus sui).”1
The problem, he went on to explain, is that living an incarnate human life means living a life that is dispersed across time, and is thus, in a certain sense, scattered: “Time is the mode of a being that is not totally present to its whole self.”2 Self-possession for such creatures requires a deliberate movement to collect “the key moments and phases of our own past,” to find the hidden pattern within them, and begin to make sense of one’s life as “a meaningful story, and not just a collection of unconnected slides about our past, stored up in more or less accurate memory.” Self-possession requires a gathering of self, fully present, with a firm grasp of all that has made one to be.
After this point, Fr. Clarke turns specifically to his audience, an annual gathering of philosophers, and exhorts them to apply the same method to their understanding of themselves as philosophers, “to try to come to know who they are existentially as philosophers.” This is not to be a bibliography or a curriculum vitae, but a chronicle of personal formation. The story of one’s whole life is one thing, but what of the key thread of one’s journey into philo-sophia, the love of wisdom? When, how, and where did the life of reason and the life of wisdom enter one’s life? Surely, this is one of the most intimate and humane stories that can be told. To tell the story of one’s philo-sophia is to tell a story about love.
In relating his own story, Fr. Clarke shares an episode which is worth quoting at length. He begins by noting how many of his greatest philosophical experiences seem tied to his love of going up to high places. During a boyhood excursion climbing a dangerous bluff on the Hudson River, he got stuck. The police began preparing a rescue operation, but since Clarke was climbing in a restricted area, to be rescued would also mean being arrested. He continues:
On studying my situation more carefully I discovered there was a bulge of rock to my right and I could see only that there was a niche for my foot beyond it. If there was one for my hand higher up, which I could not see, I could swing around and from there on it was easier going and I could get away. A decision had to be made at once. With a prayer and a hope, literally not knowing whether death or life awaited me, I gathered up my courage and swung around the rock into space. Luckily, as you can see, there was a handhold. I caught on, quickly snaked up the rest of the cliff and fled into the bushes to watch just as the cops arrived with ropes to pull me up and arrest me. But something momentous happened to me as I swung out into space, suspended between being and non-being. At that moment I suddenly broke through to the felt awareness of existence as such; I felt the bitter-sweet but extraordinarily exhilarating taste of actual existence in my mouth, the taste of its infinite preciousness and yet precariousness and of its unspeakable difference from non-existence. I felt I had somehow broken through to a new level of consciousness, and this indescribable taste of existence still lingers in my mouth today, almost as clear as it was then, fifty years ago.3
In Fr. Clarke’s account, we can see the structure of a philosophical epiphany with multiple layers. A crisis looms: a decision must be made. There is an act of reasoning: Young Clarke sees a foothold and makes a judgement about its viability. This is followed by an act of the will to commit to the course decided on by the practical judgement: he leaps. In leaping, he also makes an act of faith, and in that moment of an uncertain outcome, he tastes something new, something which cannot be communicated fully in language.
I find this anecdote deeply moving. It seems to me that hidden within the young Clarke’s epiphany of existence is a realization of the profound freedom and majesty of human agency. We have such a profound ability to choose, but rarely do we get to experience this power as the marvelous reality which it is. He acted when he did not have to, and he won. He risked all, perhaps foolishly, but gained an inestimable insight into what it means to be human: by reasoning, judging, willing, and acting, we can genuinely shape the course of our lives. In other words, what this moment gave him was a kind of wisdom.
What I desire most in taking stock of my cinephilia is to relinquish it for a time and commit it to the care of Wisdom. Fr. Clarke’s account of dispersion resonates deeply with me. I feel this scattering in my cinephilic desires, habits, and choices, which are so often either flighty and subject to fruitless whims, or bent under the pharisaical fulfilment of certain canons. Why do I feel so dissipated? What does genuine self-possession mean for the cinephile - for the person who loves cinema?
In view of this, I propose to take up Fr. Clarke’s suggestion to sketch an autobiography - an autobiography of cinephilia. What makes me who I am as a cinephile existentially? What is at the heart of this love story? How do I make sense of what is known, objectively-speaking, about cinephilia versus the contradictions and puzzles of subjective experience? And most of all, where does cinephilia yearn to place itself under the care of wisdom, to be refreshed by being placed in its proper order?
What makes a cinephile?
III.
When I consider my own history of cinephilia, certain patterns emerge: patterns of desire, and patterns of action. Both aspects have provided important points of inquiry for those studying cinephilia, but it seems that scholars often feel a tug to pick one or the other as the decisive principle of cinephilia.
Adrian Martin summarized the situation well in a 2009 essay:
“According to [Antoine] de Baecque, cinephilia may start with a kind of unutterable ecstasy or brute desire (you as the big cinephile baby before the vast cinema screen) but, straight away, that desiring engagement leads to acts - particularly of writing, speaking, programming, or curating (and also, of course, filmmaking, but that's another story) - acts that happen in public, that are broadcast, directed at the world, and that involve the forming of a community, even if that community is only a gang of friends, an editorial collective, a classroom of students, or an Internet chat group. Cinephilia is a motivating, and mobilizing, passion. Cinephilia is always about thought , always about theory, always about criticism. If it's not about those things, it's just a load of nonsense about devising best-film lists and seeing six thousand movies.”4
Unlike a purely empirical account, an autobiography is not limited to acts; it may also record desires. However, I’d like to leave that aside and approach the history of my cinephilia as a history of actions. After all, aren’t actions what tell us the most about what we love?
Where does it all begin? There is only one answer: with the act of taking pleasure or delight in a film.
Peter Labuza, host of the film podcast The Cinephiliacs, always asked his guests the same first question: what is your earliest cinematic memory? It’s such a natural and appealing starting point for considering one’s cinephilia, not least because it is animated by more fundamental questions: Are tastes firmly set by the first films we watch? Do we get to choose what we love? In other words: does cinephilia begin before the age of reason?
I can name several instances of cinematic delight from my childhood, but only one sticks out as truly wondrous: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, viewed on opening night in June 1996. Being the last day of the school year, it was already a day charged with enchantment for a seven-year old, but nothing prepared me for the first frames of the film: Gregorian chant, tolling bells, a deep breath in the soundtrack, and then… that choir! A thousand voices rising and falling in a riff on the Baroque Requiem tradition; a weightless camera soaring above clouded Paris. I was absolutely gone. I was so taken with The Hunchback that, later that week during my first watch of Star Wars, the greater pleasure was having a Captain Phoebus kids meal toy at my side for the viewing.
A different delight came when I was fourteen. It will be shared by thousands of others who also skipped school to catch the first showing of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Here, my delight was not only in blissful moments, but a kind of drunkenness in the integrity of the whole. I will never forget the feeling of exiting the theatre and hobbling to the bathroom in pure joy. I was overwhelmed by the conviction that “any kind” of film could now be made; what I really meant by that was that any kind of story world could be convincingly realized, and consequently, any kind of story could be told. I knew at that moment that filmmaking was my path. If the possibilities of cinema were now boundless, I had to be part of exploring what it could do.
The Return of the King not only gave me, as it were, my vocation as a director, but it had an even more immediate effect: it made me into a critic. Writing about the film gave me the opportunity to savour it. I went home and feverishly drafted 3000 words of praise destined for the school paper; its editor, my brother, decided to share the review with our local newspaper’s editor instead. She published it that week and that was that: I became the hometown film critic for the next four years.
Were either of these moments the birth of my cinephilia? Asking this question exposes the complex nature of pleasure as it relates to cinephilia. Immediately, one feels a desire to distinguish between kinds of pleasure; after all most people experience pleasure through the cinema. What conditions are necessary for one’s pleasure to rise to a level which demands recognition under the title of cinephilia?
Perhaps a famous conversion account will shed some light. The Cahiers du Cinéma critic and future New Wave director Éric Rohmer fell in love with the cinema in the late 1930s during a screening of Marcel Carné’s Les Quai des brumes. Reflecting in 1955 on that moment, he wrote: “To the new filmgoer that I was… Marcel Carné’s film unveiled the brilliance of a poetry which I had not known to be within the powers of the seventh art.”5
“Which I had not known…” One detects here an Augustinian-like twinge, a “late have I loved you” penned to the art of cinema. This is the damp, fleece-laden ground of revelation. There was a before, and an after; there was a conversion. What did he convert to? “The poetry” which he now knew “to be within the powers of the seventh art.” Suddenly, the cinema has a claim on him. What sort of response does this revelation of a new poetry call forth from the initiate?
Rohmer’s wonder turned back onto the source of wonder itself: he began to write criticism. Experience did not pass unexamined; he did not simply enjoy the revelation and move on. He was arrested; his gaze turned towards the site of revelation itself. It was a fundamentally philosophical motion which spoke of a desire to know. It pursued knowledge by embracing an opening which wonder had created and by the illumination of this awe, began approaching cinema itself: first by writing criticism and theory, and eventually by making films.
What is the fundamentally cinephilic turn here? It seems to me that it is the response which seeks to know. The wonder of a child is pure, but it is not necessarily inquisitive. My delight in The Hunchback did not spur a further quest to know cinema more closely. My delight in The Return of the King did. It was not my first go at thinking about film critically, but it was my first time writing about a film completely out of love for it.
The extant literature on cinephilia is unanimous that the turn to reason is the most visible sign of cinephilia. Some positions may disagree with others as to whether desire plays a more fundamental role, but there is no doubt that once a viewer turns to impassioned discourse, cinephilia has entered the picture. To return to Adrian Martin again, who put it so succinctly: “Cinephilia is a motivating, and mobilizing, passion. Cinephilia is always about thought, always about theory, always about criticism. ”
This, it seems to me, is a good place to distinguish between the taking of pleasure and the response of wonder. Delight, in its most basic form, seems to be a one-way street; one receives and enjoys, but is not required to do anything more. However, to wonder at a film, either in its totality or in a given moment, is to surrender to it. It requires a going-out of oneself, a reciprocity towards the beloved. It is a kind of loving acceptance that the film in front of us has mastered us, and not vice versa. And in the fullest sense of the definition of wonder, it pricks us to do some wondering: what is this poetry? What is cinema?
In sum, then, this process of experiencing delight and acting in response involves a twofold progression: the receiving of a gift, followed by a motion to draw closer to the beloved through knowledge. What, however, are we to do with variations of wonder that a cinephile experiences over a lifetime? Not all films provoke wonder; not all wondrous provocations merit the same degree of response. It would seem that a distinction needs to be made between kinds of wonder. I propose we separate them into pure wonder, total wonder, and momentary wonder.
First, there is the pure childlike wonder we have already discussed, which passively grasps the beloved object. My delight in The Hunchback can be isolated to particular elements: the music or certain images, but my delight in the moment was an uncritical delight in the whole film. Discrepancies between components did not register; the film was a joy to me, one grasped in its wholeness without complaint. Time has little meaning in this kind of wonder, for the judgement of the whole is entirely summarized and delivered at the end of the film as a kind of instinctive and unqualified tallying of delightful moments. My delight may have inhered in only one intensely beautiful part or in many, but the wonder of a child is such that one moment of delight is sufficient to suffuse the whole as an object of delight punctuated by favourite bits.6
The second kind, total wonder, is what I remember of that first encounter with The Return of the King: a kind of wonder which drinks in and marvels at a film as a whole object. It requires the cinephile to move from a passive grasping of the whole to a critical grasping of the whole. My awe for Return of the King was fully aware of the contingent and disparate elements which go into filmmaking; indeed, my awe was increased by this critical information. The film won my love by passing a test. My critical judgement surrendered to the integrity of the whole film, proved by the integrity of its parts working in harmony, and the result was an informed, overwhelmed wonder - a much deeper wonder than the wonder of a child, for here I knew a thing or two about how films work, knew they could be picked apart, broken down, mastered, and here was a film that in spite of that, mastered me. My awe and my love were total - they delighted in the totality of the work, a totality which I grasped with full critical knowledge, for the film revealed itself to me not only as drama or opera, but as a finely oiled machine, and a promise of opportunity. My love was not only for this film but for all film because of this film. The experience of a film as a harmonic, poetic, and life-giving thing was not new to me - for I knew this passively as a child in 1996. What was new to me was the idea of a film as a harmonic, poetic, and life-giving thing. An experience can only happen once, but an idea can be repeated, reshaped, remade, again and again. The Return of the King gave me an idea of cinema in its fullness - not only of what it is, but more importantly, what it could be. In this moment, I learned that films are made things and that I could make them too.
Was this the moment of cinephilia? The moment when viewing cinema stopped being a passively pleasurable experience and clothed itself in the life of the mind? Is critical enjoyment the key condition for cinephilia?
I believe that this was indeed the inaugural hour of my cinephilia. The wound of total wonder and the turn to knowledge and discourse is the decisive shift in one’s posture towards loving cinema. What I became increasingly surprised to find out, though, was that it was only the beginning of something much deeper. Total wonder is only a doorway.
IV.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the film theorist Paul Willemen found himself returning again and again to an aspect of cinephilia which he couldn’t shake: epiphanic moments. He noticed that cinephiles, beginning with the French impressionist filmmakers and critics of the 1920s, and continuing through the postwar Parisian scene of the 1940s and 50s, showed a remarkable tendency to fixate on singular moments in films. For the idealists of the 1920s, a fascination with the indescribable presence of things captured on film was so strong that they invented a term, photogénie, to define the shiver of existence they found in watching films.7 A generation later, the cinephiles of Cahiers du Cinema did not revive the doctrine of photogénie, but as part of their theory of auteurism, they seized upon the importance of certain moments which revealed to them, inadvertently, the presence of a director’s personality.
These moments were not celebrated for their significatory power or for their integration as part of a whole - they were celebrated for their own sake. In Willemen’s formulation, these moments revealed something beyond themselves, and beyond whatever the filmmakers intended:
“What is being looked for is a moment or, given that a moment is too unitary, a dimension of a moment which triggers for the viewer either the realisation or the illusion of a realisation that what is being seen is in excess of what is being shown. Consequently you see something that is revelatory. It reveals an aspect or a dimension of a person, whether it’s the actor or the director, which is not choreographed for you to see. It is produced en plus, in excess or in addition, almost involuntarily.8
In early 2011, while studying at film school in Vancouver, I found myself at the cinema for Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. It was one of the most unforgettable screenings of my life.
The film follows a man and a woman who meet in Tuscany, go on an afternoon date, and partway through, are mistaken for a married couple by a bystander. They run with the game and begin fully inhabiting the roles of a middle-aged marriage such that, by the end, it’s impossible to tell if they really were married all along (and we are actually witnessing their reunion) or if they are experiencing a psychotic break with reality. The film ends in a hotel room with a profoundly intimate, nearly silent exchange. They are trying to decide whether to stay together or to part ways so the man can catch his train. The “husband,” played by William Shimell, goes into the bathroom to shave, stops, and then leaves the frame, leaving us with a view of the town through an open window. The film ends with this view as a chorus of bells peal out across the rooftops and the gentle sounds of a Tuscan evening filter in. We never find out whether they stay together or not.
I was still hearing those bells as I rode the escalator down from the theater. To this day, I can’t ride that escalator without thinking of Certified Copy, and the feeling of repose that washed over me as the film ended. Those bells remained with me for weeks and months afterwards. What kind of wonder was this?
What is the meaning of the bells? I could not tell you. All I can tell you is that they were and that I loved them. In the final analysis, it’s not simply about the bells, but about the entirety of that last scene’s soundscape: the ambience of an Italian village winding down for the day, and of being far enough above the street that only a few sounds filter into a quiet room. It’s not simply about the sound, but about the end point of a carefully constructed narrative which, after so many turns, ends in mystery. It’s about the bottling of a singular moment with all of the powers which cinema affords: of the way that late daylight plays into a small room, of the winding down of a day between intimates, of the silence which descends naturally after so much talk, and this silence is filled with possibility - and then it is filled with the sounds of life, and the sound of bells.
Some no doubt associate the bells with the idea of marriage, with the union or reunion taking place in the story. Some read them as a sly underscoring of a personal epiphany the male character seems to be undergoing in his final moments onscreen. Such readings are valid; the moment is not exhausted by them - but even the most cursory knowledge of the director’s previous work discourages symbolic readings. Like many of his films, he leaves us in a moment which does not have an explicit or even an implicit meaning, but is charged with potential. In this moment, I sense something wondrous but do not know what it is; it is obscured from my rational powers. And this is precisely what we are chasing in the third type of cinephilic wonder: A momentary wonder which is obscurely grasped.
“That which is in excess of what is being shown.” I can’t think of a simpler or more beautiful description of the moment when the bells began to ring. Somehow, this moment of Certified Copy is in excess of what it is showing. This kind of epiphany, this momentary wonder, is the most hidden and most desired treasure of cinephilia.
Willemen’s treatment of photogénie and the epiphanic moment is psychoanalytic more than anything else. It’s a rich analysis, to be sure, but for my part, I can’t help but interpret this phenomenon as a fundamentally poetic encounter between a person and “the secret aspects and infinitely varied meanings of Things, whose visibility conceals but can, by virtue of man’s spiritual power, reveal the ocean of being.”9 In other words: the encounter between person, beings, and Being.
I have found this encounter in too many films to name, in films that I have grasped and loved totally and in films I have grasped and loved obscurely. The speedboat passages of Miami Vice, the reverberating stereos of American Graffiti, the fourth-wall skimming glances in The Awful Truth, Huw clattering his cutlery in How Green Was My Valley, the music-making in Perceval le Gallois, the lithe camera movements of Flowers of Shanghai… Each, in their own way, brings me to my knees. Each whispers of something more real than what is being shown.
This, then, seems to me the end, or fulfilment, of cinephilia: an encounter with beings and with Being. For me, this discovery activated an entirely new pursuit of cinema. The revelation that any film, no matter how high or low, fast or slow, concrete or abstract, could provide an encounter with being was like discovering a superpower - the cinephile, in theory, could go with confidence into any film with a patient disposition to find and love being. In reality, I found myself still subject to certain tastes and inclinations, not to mention concupiscences, and in need of the virtue of prudence to discern the most urgent priorities - but by and large, this breakthrough is what launched me into the full-time avocation of cinephilia. I do not mean full-time in the sense of literally doing cinephilia all the time, but in the sense of being a cinephile all the time. Everything in my life became coloured by the love of cinema and its pursuit; it became, as Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux’s definition of cinephilia says, “life organized around films.”10
V.
So far, we have discussed two joys of cinephilia: wonder and knowledge. Living a more intentional life organized around films revealed two other joys which add to the arc of my cinephilic history: habit and friendship. A brief word on both…
Cinephilic habits spring out of the desire to know and the desire to come closer to the beloved. Their role is to help bring the cinephile closer to the “what” which he is seeking in cinema. While habits begin to activate as soon as the cinephile begins to actively move towards cinema, they can go through intense developments of their own. One example from my own story: the power of a retrospective.
After the epiphanic turn I experienced in my early 20s, I began the habit of spending more time at the Cinematheque. My cinephilia moved from being a largely home-based activity to being primarily in the theater. This crested in 2015 when I took the opportunity to attend a full retrospective of the works of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien - 18 films in all, over the course of a month.
Attending this retrospective was one of the greatest adventures of my life. It was a pure, undistracted immersion into the work of a master. It also dominated my life for a month, requiring multiple screenings a week, as well as long commutes from work and home. While I had already been practicing cinephilia in a habitual way, the intensity of this commitment revealed to me another power of cinephilia: encountering the cinema as an encounter with a person.
A sustained experience of one director’s work over a month offers obvious benefits, especially an opportunity to compare films, techniques, and ideas without the fog of memory. In the case of Hou, what struck me the most was the sense of gradually coming to feel a kind of relationship with him, even when I only obscurely grasped his films. The failure to comprehend a given work, or even to have an encounter with being through it, was not grounds for disappointment; what mattered was an encounter with the body of films as a whole. And to be clear, most of these films were rich, poetic works. As a body, what they whispered in their own remote way was something of the person who made them.11
This is the joy of habit: it’s the practical means by which one’s cinephilia journeys “further up and further in.” It’s an extraordinarily creative and personal journey. But there is still another joy which goes hand in hand with this, and that is the joy of friendship.
In my story, a growth in cinephilic habits fostered a growth in friendship. Two moments spring to mind. The first was falling into a regular discussion of cinema with some film school pals. Our habits of discoursing about cinema led naturally to discussion of other things, and to beginning to share our lives with each other. Over the course of that autumn, the four of us began screening our favourite films for each other.
What I recall of this time is that there is no joy quite like realizing a friend has come to love the same film with equal or greater passion. This is truly Aristotle’s “friendship of pleasure” pushed to its highest state; indeed, where the love for cinema is truly concerned with its deeper nature, I dare say that that is enough of a seed to move the friendship towards the consideration of higher things. And indeed, as time went on, these friendships evolved into true “friendships of virtue.”
The second involved the Hou Hsiao-hsien retrospective. At first I was one of the ghosts of the Cinematheque - the mission was to talk to nobody, watch the films, and leave. Over time, I started to recognize the other regulars, but never ventured to break the ice. It’s almost the same dynamic as going to daily Mass with the same people for years and never having a conversation with them; yet they are close to you such that when they’re not present, you immediately notice. Anyway, near the end of the retrospective, someone very kindly reached out to me, started a conversation, and opened a door to a whole community of cinephiles that became my own. For that gesture of kindness, and for the habit of watching which brought me there, I will always be grateful.
VI.
I began this essay with a desire to take stock of my cinephilia. It is time for us to make an assessment.
In summary, my life as a cinephile has been marked by its joyful movements. Delighting led to knowing. Knowing led to epiphany. Epiphany spurred on habits. Habits opened the door to friendship. Beyond the starting point of delight, the ordering of these movements need not follow a strict chronology. It seems right to say that they are all simultaneously active in the soul of the cinephile, but are willed into action in time under specific conditions.
If I were writing this account in 2016, perhaps joy is where the story would have ended, with a contented sigh at the goodness of a cinephilic life achieved. It wasn’t to be. If we are to deal with cinephilia as a real, human thing - the province of a person - we must admit that it is as subject to the frailties and vices of man as anything else in human behaviour. At the height of my joy as a cinephile, the reality of fallen human nature began to assert itself.
First, in recent years it has become clear to me that the cinephile’s desire to know can easily be twisted into something else: curiositas. In the classical and patristic traditions, curiositas or “curiosity” describes a vicious tendency to excessively seek knowledge for its own sake. It is a pursuit of knowledge which aims to possess everything it can find. In doing so, it loses sight of the whole picture of reality: “The life of the curious, therefore, is one of infinite dissatisfaction.”12
It is hard to dispel the thought that the pursuit of films, the drive to know cinema through as many individual films as possible, is simply a species of curiositas. I have seen the tendencies in my own inclinations, which are easily tempted towards treating films as names to be crossed off an endless list. I’ve also felt it in the pressures of cinephilic social life, where one is coerced by the trends of the moment on Letterboxd or Twitter into watching films that are part of the current discourse, but hold no real interest. In this light, a “life organized around cinema” sounds more like work than play - and indeed, it often is. The question that must be asked is: what is necessary to make cinephilia’s quest for knowledge a virtuous, life-giving pursuit? How does one begin to fight the vices of cinephilia?
Second, and related to curiosity, is a doubt about the validity of cinephilic habits as an integral part of a well-lived life. Cinephilic habits are concerned with only one thing: coming closer to the good of cinema. In my experience, this allure, which is so overwhelming, has made it easy to ignore the virtue of prudence.
I can’t improve on Susan Sontag’s formulation of this passion: “For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.”13 This is exactly how it feels. At the height of my most public cinephilic activities, my leisure time was completely given over to cinephilia. There were many weeks when I seemed to live at the Cinematheque. Such behaviour provides the sort of memories which pass into nostalgia and are stripped of their complexity, but under examination they wilt. Relationships which were rooted outside of cinephilia - and indeed, most of my most important relationships have been with non-cinephiles - bore the brunt of my passion. Cinephilia is obsessive or devoted; how much is too much? And so the question here is: how does one begin to live the cinephilic life justly and prudently?
Third, and this is the sorrow which pains me the most, is the frailty of cinephilic friendships. “Film communities are fragile, notoriously subject to attrition,” wrote Dan Sallitt in a mid-2000’s reflection.14 This is something that each generation of cinephiles finds out in its time, but it makes it no less easier to bear. That many friendships are founded on utility or pleasure, and a few on true virtue is not something to lament. As Aristotle noted, this is simply the natural state of things.15 You can’t be good friends with everybody. Why then, has the ebb and flow of these friendships disappointed me so much?
I think it has to do with a certain tendency in cinephilic cultures to sentimentalize the virtues gained while pursuing films - virtues like patience, courage, and magnanimity - into an ethical system of its own. During the 2010s, the cinephilic crowd I most identified with often made reference to “generosity” as a kind of value to be sought in films, and as a virtue one could exercise through their cinephilia. The generous cinephile did not judge too quickly nor demand predetermined requirements from a film, but received everything with a patient and gentle openness. This is indeed laudable; to me, this is the very model of what a cinephile’s posture should be. In some ways, the ideal type of this cinephile was inevitably to be found populating the avant-garde communities at certain film festivals, which, owing to the obscure nature of much experimental work, provided a perfect setting to exercise one’s generosity. In like kind, praising a narrative film as “generous” was primarily a way to praise filmmakers who seemed to approach their subjects (including deeply troubling and morally complex ones) with a similar patience and gentleness. In my experience, though, it was often code for “non-judgemental.”
I believe that, in lieu of an actual spiritual centre, this cinephilic culture accepted the placeholder of “generosity” as its moral principle. And in my own way, I accepted it as the sign of union with fellow cinephiles. If we had nothing else in common, we could at least be bound by this generous disposition. Where “generous cinephilia” became systematized as a way of life, including in my own, it also brought an implicit politics of non-confrontation. Everything would be fine as long as everybody kept pursuing the good of cinema. And there was so much that was good, so much to drink in! But it could not last forever. A crisis of faith was inevitable.
For me, it happened a few years ago while attending one of the great European film festivals, one which goes out of its way to celebrate the spirit of generosity and community. One night, after leaving a party full of my people, the cinephiles - the real ones, the arthouse enthusiasts, the programmers, filmmakers, and critics awake to the stunning potentiality of cinema - I could not shake one simple question: what do we, the cinephiles, really stand for? What would we die for? Everyone at that party, as far as I could tell, had one thing in common: we all, in some way, presumably professed a near-religious devotion to cinema. Some might have died for their politics; surely all would have died for their loved ones. But for cinema? What, if anything, did our particular identities as cinephiles have to offer in forming and directing our lives as moral agents? I could not answer this question, and in some ways, I did not want to answer it.
Not long after this event, the local cinephilic community I was most invested in fell apart. What disheartened me the most was to discover that in the face of moral and spiritual crisis, the “bond” of cinephilia was absolutely useless. What the collapse revealed, to me, at least, was that “community” in this context was nothing more than a patchwork of friendships of utility, primarily, and some of pleasure. We did not possess the virtue necessary for true friendship and true community. How could we? We had no centre; our centre was the cinema.
This, then, is the state of my cinephilia: it knows not what it is for, anymore. It limps, and asks: Of what use is cinephilia for the good of man? Of what use is it to God?
I began this essay by calling out for Wisdom to take the hand of Cinephilia, and I renew that call here. I believe that the best way to begin answering these questions is by discovering the metaphysics of cinephilia. It is time to scour the heights and depths of cine-philia: its essence, its operations, its virtues, its vices, its crises, its politics, and its fraternity; and having reached as much of an understanding as we can, submit it to God, Who by His unfathomable mercy and providence, has permitted this strange passion a place in my life and the lives of so many I’ve cared about.
Man was not made for the cinema. The cinema was made for man. The story in which we begin to understand this has yet to be written.
W. Norris Clarke, “The Philosophical Importance of Doing One’s Autobiography” in The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old, (Fordham University Press, 2009), 6
Ibid, 6
Ibid, 9.
Adrian Martin, “Cinephilia as War Machine.” Framework 50 (1/2), 2009: 221
Eric Rohmer, “Rediscovering America” in Cahiers du Cinéma - The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 88
I think of my anticipation of a second viewing of The Hunchback, many months after the first, when the film finally arrived on home video. My love for the film as a whole was total, but I lived most for my favourite jokes and set-pieces - throwaway bits from the siege on Notre Dame in particular.
See Willemen’s essay “Photogénie and Epstein” in Looks and Frictions.
Paul Willemen, “Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered” in Looks and Frictions : Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Indiana University Press ; British Film Institute, 1994), 237
Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Meridian Books, 1955, 29
Quoted in Girish Shambu “What is Being Fought For by Today’s Cinephilia(s)? Framework 50 (1/2), 2009: 218
This is a patently auteurist position; one question we don’t have room to treat here is whether cinephilia is intrinsically auteurist or not. I hope to tackle this in a future essay.
Paul J. Griffiths, The Vice of Curiosity : an Essay on Intellectual Appetite. (CMU Press, 2006), 8
Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times, February 25, 1996.
Dan Sallitt, “The Digital Cine-Club: Letters on Blogging, Cinephilia and the Internet” in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction : Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, ed. Scott Balcerzak & Jason Sperb (Wallflower, 2009), 63
On perfect friendship, Aristotle writes:“But it is natural that such friendships should be infrequent; for such men are rare.” Nichomachean Ethics Book VIII, Part 3 (trans. W.D. Ross)