My "Top Posts" highlights continue in anticipation of my 5th anniversary this July. Each day I will be posting an intro with a link to one of the pieces I consider my best. Today I'm featuring an essay about my own engagement with the cinema: when it began, how it proceeded, where it might be headed.
As always, please don't link to or attempt to comment on this intro page, which is a temporary bump and will be deleted when a new "Top Post" is featured tomorrow. You can link to, comment on, or recommend the original post, also linked below.
Yesterday's Top Post, if you missed it, was "Astaire & Rogers", a complete video directory of every single onscreen musical sequence involving the duo.
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A memoir, a confession, a manifesto, a declaration of principles...
"The real crux, I think, is this. The cinephile loves the idea of film.
That means loving not only its accomplishments but its potential, its promise and prospects. It's as if individual films, delectable and overpowering as they can be, are but glimpses of something far grander. That distant horizon, impossible to describe fully, is cinema and it is this art form, or medium, that is the ultimate object of devotion." - David Bordwell
I had known movies for a while, but I discovered the cinema sometime between the first day of school and Christmas Eve in 1990. I was seven years old, and the discovery took several forms at once, all of which have stayed with me ever since.