The Ambitious Cinephile
Don't waste the gift of obsession
Ignore the bullshit. Discard your phone. Do the reading. Watch widely. Go to the cinema. Obsess. Learn the history. Learn the craft. Learn the theory. Study technology. Be bored. Challenge your taste. Watch silent movies. Watch old movies. Watch foreign movies. Watch B-movies. Write. Write. Write.
Stop moaning. Don’t be a cynic. Don’t indulge the cynics. Study acting. Study form. Study editing. Explore animation. Distinguish schlock from slop. Read interviews. Read modern critics. Read classic critics. Fight nostalgia. Respect the canon. Fuck the canon. Pinpoint tone. Take notes. Read Bordwell. Be wrong. Change your mind. Change it back. Be a nerd. Be an aesthete. Be a snob. Be a populist. Keep writing.
Make the time. Stop watching television. Stop playing Xbox. Ignore awards. Listen to soundtracks. Have a watchlist. Find community. Collaborate. Proselytize. Persuade. Make trade-offs. Don’t comment on commentary. Support your local cinema. Upgrade your home set-up. Rewatch. Cherish your favourites. Be genre blind. Be a genre obsessive. Go to the cinema alone. Go to the cinema late at night. Find a bigger screen. Find a louder sound system. Write. Write. Write.
For some strange, cosmic reason, this still-young Frankenstein’s monster of an art form has chosen us to be its acolytes.
We can’t choose our passions, but we can choose what we do with them. Don’t waste the gift of obsession.
I like this a lot. I also like imagining it spoken over some kind of mid 90s trance track.
Obsess is good advice. When I was younger I’d watch at least 3 a day or night. Break down different aspects of a film if I had seen it, watch without the sound to learn storytelling through image, study what filmmaker led to which new movement or caused shifts in film as a response, what different departments do and the choices they made, what decisions each individual storyteller made and which they left open. Hell I still watch 7-10 a week. If you want to understand something, especially something as vast and sprawling as film, you have to engage!