Cinemania (review)

Cinema has long had the power to breed fanatics. Its history has been made, written, and preserved largely by incurable filmgoers, individuals who have spent significant portions of their lives in movie theaters. Examples of this abound. In The Movies in the Age of Innocence film historian and literary critic Edward Wagenknecht traces his own cinephilia back to his boyhood in Chicago during the nickelodeon era. He writes of attending six different theaters in a range of as many blocks, with each theater specializing in a particular type of film. Movie houses changed bills daily, so there was no shortage of viewing possibilities, and filmgoing became a habit he never gave up. Throughout his life, many people criticized Wagenknecht for his devotion to the movies. They thought he was wasting his time.¹

Another case is essayist Philip Lopate. He also caught the movie bug in childhood. Fifty-odd years later, he still lived in the throes of cinephilia: "Those friends who shared my celluloid fever in college mostly graduated to higher things—opera, ballet or the theater, whereas for me it was the opposite: other performing arts were fallback options when I could not find a movie to see. If you ask me today what I want to do on my birthday, the answer is, 'Go to a movie.'" In his portrait of Pauline Kael, Lopate suggests that the trailblazing New Yorker writer may have been excessive in her movie enthusiasms—an interesting observation from someone who claims to have spent fifty thousand hours in the dark watching films.²

The most celebrated cinephiles are film directors whose omnivorous movie consumption is part of their personas. During his pre-Reservoir Dogs days, Quentin Tarantino turned down summer trips to Europe, preferring to watch films instead.³ In A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, Scorsese quotes Frank Capra: "Film is a disease....When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone....As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film."⁴

Such a dire pronouncement on cinephilia is rare, particularly from an acclaimed director. The implicit command, at least in documentaries about the medium, is not to quit watching films cold turkey, but to give in to the pleasures of viewing, of reliving collective memories. Most documentaries about filmmaking or filmmakers intimate that nearly everyone is to some greater or lesser degree a helpless cinephile. The time-tested formula for these documentaries is a combination of movie clips, stills, interviews, and commentary. The mission of these documentaries is usually to stress the importance of the films excerpted and, by extension, the medium as a whole—its beauty, its power, its larger-than-life quality. Scorsese may compare film to heroin at the beginning of his tribute to American cinema, but his knowledge and his infectious avidity for movies give the lie to any notion that cinephilia may be an unfortunate addiction. Where would Tarantino, Kael, and others be without their love of film? For these people, advanced cases of cinephilia were springboards to brilliant careers.

Cinemania differs from most documentaries that take their inspiration from the film medium in that it focuses not on the movies, but on dedicated viewers and their lifestyles. For those who are tired of clip-laden paeans to the dream factories of yore, this bleakly funny film will be a pleasing change of pace. It interweaves profiles of New York City filmgoers Jack Angstreich, Bill Heidbreder, Roberta Hill, Eric Chadbourne, and Harvey Schwartz. The expressions "film fan" and "movie buff" seem too tame, too neutral to describe these individuals whose lives are dictated by their need to attend as many screenings as possible.

One of Cinemania's charms is its complete lack of glamour. Most works that delve into cinephilia play up movies' significance, their seductiveness. They show beautiful people, tell of fortunes spent and hearts broken, interview maverick directors...