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Days and Nights of a Cinephile
Cinephilia isn’t only a desire to watch movies. It is a powerful wish to expand and prolong the experience of cinema, to have it permeate one’s existence. In 1948, André Bazin wrote of the need for the critic to consider ‘the total art of watching films’. What might this totality include? For the cinephile of the classical era, this expansion of the film experience most often meant reading—not only criticism, but fiction, history and philosophy—as a way to bring films into contact with a number of other domains. These points of contact were then shared through writing, in both formal and informal journalism. The digital age, particularly with the development of the blog and the DVD, has reignited this classical form of cinephilia, and no blogger has revived it more powerfully than Girish Shambu. In Days and Nights of a Cinephile, Shambu offers his reflections on what he watches, what he reads and who he talks to, locating points of contact that illuminate both the films he views and the life he leads.
There are movies we encounter at certain points in our appreciation for the medium that become, almost by accident, little breakthroughs in our viewing life. They may not be great masterpieces—though they well might—but the important thing is that we have the fortune of meeting up with them at just the right juncture in our development. I think of them as ‘signpost films’: they take a patch of aesthetic territory that was previously foggy or unmapped to us and they suddenly open it up, making us see and learn something revelatory about this art-form that we love. Each ‘signpost film’ offers us some sort of lesson or fundamental insight about cinema that we then proceed to carry with us and apply to hundreds of films we encounter in the future.
is a chemical engineer and an associate professor of operations management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He is also a cinephile who keeps an eponymous film blog. His writings on film have appeared in Senses of Cinema, Framework, Cineaste and Artforum.
