An attempt to become a cinephile

I am not the cinephile in the friend group, but I know a few cinephiles, and maybe I can absorb their knowledge.

maybe not. whatever. I am jealous of them and what they have.

It’s like memorizing poetry, a little bit, to know movies and have a depth of feeling attached to them, and to be able to pull them up from memory and to give people recommendations based on mood, or to feel the mood on a given day and know what to put on, like your friend in Wyoming with that record player who sits and knows exactly which record to play and how to switch them for six hours straight. Oh you don’t have that friend?

This is why I feel like I have enough to die happy. Thanks Salton <3

So I made a list of movies for a movie club the other day, and then recursed on it for a bit, and that’s the most like a cinephile I’d ever felt in my life, until afterwards, when I realized that for every movie I wrote down that we would be watching, I would really like to watch an additional movie that I might like as much as the one I wrote down, or one that is somehow thematically or artistically related.

This using the intensity of positive feelings to then find other things you love that generate positive feelings I think is a core spirit of the thing.

An easy way to do this is to just watch another movie by the same director. It is rare for a director to make only one movie.

Then you will realize there are a few directors you like a whole lot, and you want to learn about more directors. Then you just go and…read about movies. With the internet and AI this is insane because you can get insanely tailored recommendations. Like if I put in our first movie The Cow (1969) I get

The Metamorphosis (2002): Directed by Valery Fokin
The Tenant (1976): Directed by Roman Polanski

And these sounds like really good interesting movies I should really want to watch if I am interested in continuing looking at themes of metamorphosis. Even though I am confused about how I’m supposed to feel about watching Polanski, these are good for recommendations I got in 3 seconds.

It seems like the first step is actually to just watch a bunch of movies and to have some core group of ones you really like, and if you are not watching movies that you actually really really like, unambiguously, that you would be more than happy to rewatch, try to get recommendations from somebody who seems like they know what they are talking about, or try to go down a rabbit hole.

I was not a rabbit hole person. Somebody with good taste sat with me and watched a lot of really good movies. And some of those movies I did not understand. Some of them I thought I did understand, and then I rewatched them, and then it turned out I did not actually understand it the first time.

Some movies I thought I would be really into, and then was not into, like The Machinist.

But anyway…

So you have your core movies that make you happy and then you find other movies that make you happy.

Cinephile is just a lover of movies.