I've been a cinephile for 10 years

On August 1st, 2011 I watched Werckmeister Harmonies for the first time. This day changed my life. It made me want to search for more films that will make me feel the same thing I felt as I was watching Bela Tarr's masterpiece.

I never found another film like this.

But I found hundreds of masterpieces from all around the globe. From the transgressive pink masterwork School of the Holy Beast, through the anti-war pearl J'accuse, to the metaphysical Stalker: my movie journey was a path of dreams.

Since August 1st, 2011 I have watched 12.416 films (more than the number of my posts on MoFo!) and covered a considerable area of the world's cinema map.

I knew that my 10th anniversary was coming soon and I'd been waiting for the day for months. I had been thinking about how I should celebrate it and what films I will watch or rewatch that day.

But when the day finally came, I just plain missed it! Well, I watched 9 films that day, but I didn't remember it was that day. I only realized that now - 4 days later.

Still, it's never too late to watch a movie. And I will be celebrating for three days straight, starting tomorrow.

I don't know what I'll watch, but I'll manage. I'm not asking you for any recommendations - I'll pick something myself. Whatever I pick - this is not the end. It's only a decade. Cinephilia is a life-long commitment.



And so I will be continuing my journey.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here.

__________________
Being kind to others never goes out of style.

I don't have a question, but it does raise a question for myself: I'm not sure I could pinpoint an exact date for when I became a cinephile. Maybe watching Fantasia in a theater when I was 3 or 4.


Oddly enough, it was 10 years ago, in August 2011, when after watching Tree of Life, which left me with a similar experience of revealed elation, I basically began my online life, and Jinnistan was born at RT because I felt inspired to use their blogs to write about the film. (I have written a lot about the film, but I never got around to actually fulfilling this intention as I conceived it.)


So I'll celebrate in tandem for the decade-versery of this fiery familiar sand-sprite that I've chosen to hide behind.

Like Jinnistan, I don't know if I can pinpoint the exact moment I became a "cinephile". A teenage viewing of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (in full screen! with the battle sequence cut out!) Is largely responsible for my interest in the medium. It's the first time I really grasped the concept of direction.


Summer of 2013, on the same site he mentions, in a bout of unemployment-induced boredom and general aimlessness, I began trying to write about every single movie I watched. I'd been posting on that site passively for a few years until then (and mostly lurking), but that was when I really got into the idea of discussing movies. A lot of what I wrote during those years is likely embarrassing, but I suppose that's healthy. Hopefully I'm a better writer these days.


Now, back to the OP. I probably owe School of the Holy Beast another shot. I found it was too in love with its kinkiness for the religious satire to stick, and too self serious for it to be enjoyed on prurient grounds. Nice to look at, though, and I did greatly enjoy Roaring Fire from the same director (featuring a pet monkey and Sonny Chiba doing magic tricks), so happy to go back to this at some point

These replies as well as the OP were good reads.


I suppose my journey began back in 2004 I was about 14 and was searching and searching online for news on the comic book movies that were being released at the time (Think X-Men 3 or Fantastic 4)...when I happened upon the RT forums. Here were a bunch of people talking about movies that I had absolutely never heard of.


Who was this Bergman? Tarkovsky? Kurosawhat? Anyway I happened upon a thread about Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and I remember thinking it looked so cool! A crazy heist gone wrong movie. My dad vaguely remembered liking it so we went to Video Stop and rented the DVD. I had never seen anything like it before. The movie felt so real. It was gritty. It was natural... It felt like I was just watching life unfold. That movie changed everything for me.


A few months later I decided to stop lurking and joined RT under paranoid android. The friends I made on that website truly changed the way I looked at film and shaped my taste through recommendations and wonderful posts/essays. Racked up probably 8000 posts between 2005 and 2012 then I sort of fell off the radar online... until popping in here again... now... on a bit of whim....


Posting on RT from ages 14 to 22 honestly shaped more than just my taste in film though. **** those were my formative years... It shaped a fair bit of my personality.

I don’t know, I don’t feel like I had a choice in the matter. My brother works in film, my mother’s first love and first husband were filmmakers (different people). I kind of just fell into it from the age of 5. Jokes aside, if kids are brought up watching the exact same thing as adults from the get-go, and if adults watch reputable cinema, Sergio Leone and all, from the get-go, taste develops naturally.

I am a lifelong fan of the speculative, and a part of me will always prefer genre cinema, but I would still say I have been a cinephile for as long as I can remember. That said, I don’t believe being a cinephile or considering yourself one confers on one an obligation to enjoy or even “appreciate” all the classics/“officially great” films.

I do remember consciously pushing myself after I turned 13. Watching things which could seem boring, but which I’d found on “the best of all time” lists and knew were worth being aware of. I would still argue it’s a good policy, would recommend it to anyone, as once taste develops, you can’t really “go back”, I don’t think.

Have you seen the new 4k restoration of Werckmeister Harmonies? Here is my review: https://letterboxd.com/wu_yong/film/...ter-harmonies/

These days I want to revisit the films that resonate the most with me. I might write a detailed review of Last Year at Marienbad, as I believe I have many interesting/novel things to say about it. FYI, this Werckmeister Harmonies review was one of the more satisfying reviews that I had the pleasure of writing - alongside Jeanne Dielman. You may also look at my other reviews on letterboxd - especially on Vertigo, Persona, Dimensions of Dialogue, Antigone.

You're doing a better job than I'm doing, then. Around that same time, I watched Chinatown for the first time, and that movie alone inspired me to get more serious. Unfortunately, I'm more serious about music albums than movies. I've seen over 2,000 movies over the last 12 years and heard 11,000 albums, but albums are much quicker to get through, and I'm not counting short films. Even now I'm keeping three new lists for restaurants, sodas and energy drinks.



So mathematically, this math means you'd have to watch an average of 3.3 movies a day for ten years. Very impressive.

I haven't yet. I believe the BluRay will look even better than the WebDL versions flying on the net. So I'm going to wait a little bit for my 4th watch. It's been 10 years since I watched it, so my next watch should be something special.

I always tell myself I need to do this and while I rewatch a slightly bigger number of films than I used to, the number is still minuscule compared to new watches. I just can't focus on rewatches while there are still so many unseen movies!

Looking forward to your Last Year at Marienbad review & I read some of your other reviews. Good job!

I'm at 17,181 movies atm, including shorts. I don't really know what the number of shorts is, as I don't really make much distinction between shorts and full-lengths, but in case somebody would say "I'm cheating", I'm pretty sure I've seen at the very least 10k full-lengths if not 12k+. As for albums: 7690, excluding singles. I rated 1110 singles. I actually have a tag for singles so I know this as opposed to shorts.

Yeah, it gets easier with shorts, but only a little bit. The fact is I'm watching inhuman quantities of films. Not quite as many as Mark used to, but infinitely more than your average Joe. I hardly ever have time for anything else!

I guess you could say mine started roughly 20 years ago now. Batman, Indiana Jones, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were my childhood people I had to see. A short late 90's Will Smith phase followed. Didn't really follow much during the 98 - 02 years because of NFL and Pro Wrestling.

One day I remember we went to a kids house and they had just put Reservoir Dogs on and I was hooked just by the opening dialogue pre credit scene. Never really paid attention to what people said in movies before that but after that I became highly interested in people speaking in movies. The words seem to carry more weight than before. Afterwards I started renting more movies from the library, more classic movies I had never even considered and to say it was an opening of pandora's box would be an understatement. So many hours watching and missing out on other things and here I am today. To think that none of this would have happened if I hadn't went with my friends that day to pick up drugs.

The reason I don't include shorts has nothing to do with "cheating" or anything like that. I just don't want to have to go through all the cartoon skits I watched as a kid and include them based on the "short film" technicality. Of course, it's the same reason I generally don't include serials, because they're practically pre-TV TV.

I went from your average teenage movie watcher to someone interested in the finer stuff when I stumbled across Dennis Potter teleplays on television and became absolutely entranced. This was many decades ago - but despite my interest in film, I think I only ever really became a cinephile over the past few years, digging down a little deeper - watching films based on research, recommendations, filmmaker, artist and prestige awards. Buying heaps of Criterion Collection films, reading, writing more. Obviously there are people here who have a very deep understanding of what cinema is, and have seen many more films made by masters than me - I'm a beginner, but I've crammed a lot in over the past few years. I'm dedicated to keep on cramming more in until the day I die - going through periods (when I have the time) watching 4 or more films per day and exploring more obscure and little-seen great films. I only recently became aware of the iceberg - ie, I only thought there were a limited number of great films out there, but really there are 1000s of worthy masterpieces that have been released around the world. They just don't get any exposure - you have to go looking for them as they lurk beneath the surface.

__________________

I watched most of these shorts as an adult! And yes, an awful lot of cartoons and early silents!
Feuillade's serials are more film than Marvel.

Yokay, Scorsese. But if it has a singular release date and isn't released via 20 short films, it's a movie to me, regardless of whatever definition of artistic merit anybody uses.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a movie, too, so whatever. Marvel films are films, of course. But if we count them as films, then so we should Les Vampires. I'm for a liberal definition of film.

I'd thought I'd seen your name on the registry.

Berlin Alexanderplatz: 2020 or 1980?
Les Vampires: Only if it's been released in a film format, and not like a miniseries like Band of Brothers. Otherwise, it's pre-TV TV to me.

Both. It must've if it's on RYM. Check-mate!

RYM isn't perfect. They have difficulty getting things together often. Hell, they recently deleted a whole band page with a couple of rare albums I've heard, and for no reason. They don't even tag any films as shorts like Letterboxd does. I still use RYM for albums and movie genre-tagging, but they are far from perfect. Even if a movie's counted as a movie on Letterboxd I still don't count it. I got my own set of rules for what qualifies as a movie, and it's a forgiving and simple one,. but also a strict one.

1. Single-year release date
2. Not released in a bunch of short parts like TV episodes.
3. The above is allowed if a film-version home video release exists. Ex. Fanny and Alexander.

Oh, and the mod staff are crap at listening very well, unlike another forum I can name. So RYM isn't like hell or anything. Is till use it, but it's far from perfect.

That was a joke. I was being flippant. Of course, RYM isn't perfect. As far as your points about RYM go, I agree on all counts. For movies, I'd rather have the definition as wide as possible. But that's partly because RYM doesn't allow TV series in the database and I like to have everything in one place.

The 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz was released in theaters in something like 2 hour increments, in the same week. Counts as a film in my book. Bondarchuk’s War and Peace wasn’t released all in one go either. So while I wouldn’t call the Marvel films one long serial, I can understand how others might come to that conclusion.