A comment by Anonymous at Girish's on the stages in the life of a cinephile contains more truth than I'd like to admit:
1. Ages 6-13/ marvel at the lights, learn about adult life, eat sugar/Disney, Spielberg, John HughesIn my case, stage 1 began at age 3 (at a drive-in with, yes, Disney's 1961 "101 Dalmatians"). Stage 3 lasted until about age 37, and stages 4 and 5 were condensed, though I'm not sure I ever became a neo-populist, since I never disliked popular movies just because they were popular. (No comment about stage 6.) My real "crisis of faith" in movies was from about 1998 - 2003.2. Ages 14-19/ age of discovery, excitement and inspiration/ Rear Window, Bicycle Thief, early Godard
3. Ages 20-26/ O.C.D. attempt to see everything by every major director/ Dreyer, Ozu, late Godard
4. Ages 27-33/ burn out period, start seeing films rarely and complain about how bad movies have gotten, sell your old videos/ Straub, Snow, Dziga Vertov Group
5. Ages 34-41/ burn out continues, fall asleep in one two many Sokurov films, stop watching art films and start watching blockbusters again, become a faux-populist and develop inane arguments about movies you’ve never seen
6. Ages 42-45/ watch only Reality TV and Internet porn, get drunk alone, send mass emails linking to Armond White reviews
7. Ages 46- /after therapy and anti-depressants repeat steps 3-6.
BTW, the book "Defining Moments in Movies," edited by Chris Fujiwara, that inspired this comment is delicious and nutritious cinemaniacal brain candy. Once you start tasting, you'll just want more and more. As Fujiwara explains in his introduction, the 800-page, still-studded nibble-book (organized by decade, 1890 - 2000+) "is designed to highlight film scenes, or events in the history of cinema, that the [62] contributors (who include film critics, film historians, writers in other fields, and academics) regard as profound, essential, illuminating, or significant..." -- "a network of visions and preoccupations, an anthology of cinephilic passions, a casual encyclopedia of cinematic events." In fact, Fujiwara's intro is a worthy "moment" itself.
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Here were my stages:
Ages 6-13: Watch whatever Kng Fu movies were playing on Channel 48 on the B&W TV. Cry when E.T. phones home. Cry when Spock dies.
Ages 14-15: See first R-rated movie in theater; mortified to discover parents in theater watching same movie. Not old enough to be mortified that said movie was "Ruthless People." Cry when Spock dies.
Ages 16-21: Get VCR; see Taxi Driver; realize movies can be "important." Get hooked on Tarantino; get hooked BY Tarantino; watch all the kung fu movies that didn't play on Channel 48. Cry when Spock dies.
Age 22-25: Watch lots of movies; go to film production grad program. Decide I know more than my teachers. When teacher compares my pitch for a film to an idea by Luis Bunuel, be offended by being compared to some foreign guy that Tarantino never told me about. Cry because all the new Star Trek w/o Spock is so lame.
Age 26-30: Start getting "serious" about movies, which means watching foreign movies NOT on Tarantino's list. Start with Ebert's Great Movies List. Get hooked on Herzog; get hooked BY Herzog. Watch "Last Year At Marienbad" and change entire view about what cinema can be. Watch Godard's early movies.
Age 31-35 (present): Decide not to like Tarantino anymore. Go back to film school for film studies this time. Get hooked on Jonathan Rosenbaum; get hooked on Manny Farber; shake head at Armond White, but keep reading. Straub, Snow, Dziga Vertov Group. Insist that William Shatner , Divine and The Three Stooges are the best actors of all time, and mean it without a hint of kitsch. And, yes, cry when Spock dies.
Christopher,
We sound about the same age as I cried when ET and Spock died as well. My youth.
For me I've been stuck in stages 2-3 for awhile. I'm 28 or 29 now, can't remember, hopefully it will last a long time. The only joy sometimes I've received is from a good movie.
12-16 I begin to thrive on the works of Charlie Chaplin. Die Hard was my first rated R. Bladerunner the first film that made me want to be a filmmaker. Go to see Die Hard 3 instead of going to prom. Blah on Highschool.
17-20 Film school and fall in love with Kurosawa, Bergman and Tarkovsky. "Rashomon", "Solaris", "Andrei Rublev", and all Bergman set the standards for me as a writer/director. Fall out of love with "hit movies".
20-now, continue discovering movies upon movies both the hits and the not so and well everything. There has to be more out there...
I love this line: become a faux-populist and develop inane arguments about movies you’ve never seen.
You said, though I'm not sure I ever became a neo-populist, since I never disliked popular movies just because they were popular. I interpreted that to mean the opposite, where in your youth you're all about loving every obscure "little" movie and anything made by a money making director is crap and then suddenly you start taking pride in pointing out how even horror or sci-fi or action movies can be great. Which is just another way of saying you've matured. If you've never disliked a movie just because it's popular that indicates you got there before a lot of other cinephiles ever did.
I think many critics/reviewers never get there and turn their nose up at anything that has any commercial scent about it.
As for my twenties I think I went through 2 or 3 years where I watched nothing but movies with subtitles. Problem is, that was so long ago now I'm ready to enter that stage again. I've seen so many of the foreign masterworks BUT I saw them between the ages of 19 and 24 and probably didn't even understand half of what I was watching.
So you got back in swing around the time you started work on this site? And the fact that 1999 and 2002 were watershed years didn't help?
One of the problems I see that causes 3-4 is that any cinephile seems to be expected to see every new release to stay literate in pop culture, so of course they start to see less of the classics and obscure art films. Throw television into the equation and you're at number 5.
I like the fact that the old animated films are still passed on generation to generation and that Fantasia and Snow White are liable to be the first movie a kid sees. Not only does it give them access to older cinema, but because it establishes the earlier movies in their early memories, so when they start seeing new releases, they can know where they've come from.
This was a hilarious post, and so easy to identify with. Right now, I'm in stage 3...the OCD stage, trying to catch up on all the major directors.
Jonathan: Yes, I don't think I could become a faux/neo-populist simply because I never looked at movies in those terms. In the mid-to-late '70s (my late teens and early 20s) I was equally thrilled by "Jaws" and "Nashville" and "Aguirre" and "Dawn of the Dead" and "Only Angels Have Wings" and "Animal Crackers" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Casablanca" and "Knife in the Water"...
Dan: In the '80s and early '90s I was a daily newspaper film critic. Then I edited a movie encyclopedia on CD-ROM (Cinemania) and various film-related web database projects. While trying to get RogerEbert.com going (which took a few years after the pop of the first dot-com bubble), I walked and took care of dogs for a living specifically because I wanted to do something else I love that wasn't related to movies or the web. One of the best jobs I ever had. It didn't have anything to do with the State of the Cinema at the time (though I don't know I'd consider that period, which I later did my best to catch up with, to be particularly strong). It just had to do with me. Starting this blog was a symptom of my renewed passion for movies, not a cause!
I like how Roger puts it (in his review of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe):
There's a learning process that moviegoers go through. They begin in childhood without sophistication or much taste, and for example, like ``Gamera'' more than ``Air Force One'' because flying turtles are obviously more entertaining than United States presidents. Then they grow older and develop ``taste,'' and prefer ``Air Force One,'' which is better made and has big stars and a more plausible plot. (Isn't it more believable, after all, that a president could single-handedly wipe out a planeload of terrorists than that a giant turtle could spit gobs of flame?) Then, if they continue to grow older and wiser, they complete the circle and return to ``Gamera'' again, realizing that while both movies are preposterous, the turtle movie has the charm of utter goofiness--and, in an age of flawless special effects, it is somehow more fun to watch flawed ones.
This is Pauline Kael's argument in "Art, Trash and The Movies" in a nutshell, except she replaced "Air Force One" with serious art movies that many critics (and audiences alike in some cases) consider reputable in a deep way. (A lot of Hollywood prestige pics/ best winners/ Social Issue movies that were oppressively/insufferably smugly politically correct. Also, a lot of sadistically bland European "art movies," which I guess meant some Bergman movies to her.) This was considered a revelation because pretentious critics were taking pretentious movies seriously when really they had less life in them than a movie that gave pleasure to the world, brought them back to what was human (as opposed to robotic message movies or alien artzy fartsy director) in that sense.
I love her observations, think she botches the conclusions a bit. The critics of Pauline Kael wrote that she forgot to mention there is one more stage after this: when the critic realizes they haven't solved the problem by going back to what was dumb but fun, they've just identified it. What they really want are smart, mature movies that are also entertaining, imaginative, full of life and don't feel contrived. The best of both worlds.
So, let's return first to a key Kael quote:
"If we go back and think over the movies we've enjoyed... what we enjoyed in them... had, in some rudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace of beauty, some audacity, some craziness."
-- Pauline Kael
Some craziness because you have to be a little crazy to say/make anything all that insightful. (You think I lie but look over many of the visionary movies, you'll see it there.) Moreover, the reason this is so has to do with an observation Errol Morris made (one night on Twitter): "Because we're all mad, we have difficulty remembering we're all mad." The more brilliant filmmakers know as much and follow their madness all the way through. (Herzog, Fellini, Allen, Godard, Welles, Hitchcock, Coen Bros. and Morris himself to name a few of the crazies who are generally considered the most unique of the auteurs.) Then take a step back to see what we've come up with. (I think this is what Kubrick meant when he said (I'm paraphrasing): "It sounds silly but the best advice I could give to any filmmaker is just... go make movies. Anything." You start to learn by doing it, then noting what you learned from your last experiment.)
This is, again though, a simplified version of a director's approach to a movie. Another way to put it is what David Cronenberg told the audience at his Q&A for the Essential Cinema screening of "Videodrome" at the TIFF Lightbox a few weeks back: "I make a movie to find out why I'm making it." (He also said something similar that when he asks people to make a movie with him, he still feels like he's a kid asking somebody to come play in his sandbox.)
But if you think over that statement, what he's really saying is go in with the general idea so I don't make an absolute mess, I get it down to specifics as I'm going through, then I find out what I've taken away from the process."
Hey I still have my Cinemania from the early nineties. I used to love the Cinebooks reviews on that thing. They were so thorough. And I copied all the song and score snippets onto my hard drive.
Jim,
There you go. You were enjoying the big budget Hollywood films when they were reaching for fresh pastures. "Jaws" and "Dawn of the Dead"...if only we had more experiences as fresh as those. Sure there are good action movies and such, but it all starts to feel a little redundant.
This is remarkable! As I sat a read, I was drawn to the accuracy for virtually pigeonholing cinephiles, though, like you Jim, mine began at age 3 with a Disney film ("Little Mermaid"). My dad was a cinephile too and really raised my siblings and myself on the Disney releases of the early 90s. For the longest time in my childhood, I thought the greatest movie in the world was Spielberg's "Hook". It was the first film I saw in a theater twice, and while I now recognize it's flaws, it still holds a dear place on my film-watching mantle.
I still remembered when it went into high-gear though: one December day back in my sophomore year of high school, bored out of my mind, I randomly put on my dad's copy of Hitchcock's "Notorious". Before that I had really been into war films like "Patton" because at that point I thought I was going to join the CIA, and since of course, when your 15, war seems pretty fun. But then it was Hitch, immediately followed by John Ford, and Capra, and Huston, then Scorsese, Welles, Coppola, et. al. By the time I was 18, every Friday after school was my coveted trip to the rental store, where I'd blow $5 bucks on two movies for the weekend. Over the summers, I'd go a few times a week, renting as many things as possible. The look on my mom's face whenever I'd go rent stuff was priceless. In retrospect, it was quite a chunk of change I spent from my after school job on it. Probably the reason why I currently have a student loan (it's a small one). Now I look at my Netflix queue, awaiting the filmographies of Ozu, Malle, Herzog, Renoir, Tarkovsky, you name it.
Sorry for the flight of self-indulgent ego (I doubt anyone really wanted to hear my autobiography), but to know that you're not completely insane for suggesting to your friends to go to a non-multiplex to watch a non-Hottie of the Week movie is a blissful feeling.
Now start waiting for the first psychological panel on the dispositions and Freudian nature of the film junkie.
My wife has been made well aware of the Olympian position Defining Moments In Movies has on my Christmas list, so I suspect I'll be diving into this one soon. This looks utterly irresistible!
As for the stages in the life of a cinephile, I was about to dive into my own stages here, but I think I'm going to hold off for about a week-- unless you (or the anonymous poster on Girish's site) have any objections, I have a feeling this little chart can be effectively absorbed into the upcoming quiz over at SLIFR! This is going to be lots of fun! You can, of course, copy and paste your answers if you so choose, but details-- I want more details, man!
You edited Cinemania, Jim? Wow, I completely forgot about that thing. I read those reviews religiously in college.
What a great idea. I've posted my own rather long recounting of my development into a cinephile here: http://www.lucidscreening.com/2008/01/stages_of_a_cinephile.html
Quite, all can be
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