Learning to Love the Movies: Puzzles, Participation, and Cinephilia in Interwar European Film Magazines

Most scholars would agree that cinephilia results not simply from a spontaneous love of movies but historically has also been inseparable from processes of legitimization, audience training, and formations of taste. Yet we still know little about the deeper history of cinephilia’s emergence: how audiences learned to love the movies and why. This article considers one site for thinking about this question during the “first wave” of cinephilia in the 1920s, namely the puzzle contest as it developed and proliferated in the new landscape of popular magazines in England, France, Germany, and other European countries. Culminating in a discussion of the Viennese magazine Mein Film, this article examines the media-historical and cultural contexts of photographic puzzles to show how they figured in a broader program of participatory and playful pedagogy by which readers could learn to frame film knowledge, film affect, and film experience in the context of an emerging European star system.