"Cinemania" -- MUST READ

Films/DVD Asylum

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By Duncan Shepherd, San Diego Reader
Anyone who fancies himself anything of a film fan ought to be required to see Cinemania, Angela Christlieb's and Stephen Kijak's German-financed video documentary focussed on five New York cinephiles, four men and one woman, all of them single and unattached, acquaintances if not necessarily friends. "Film," one of them submits, "is a substitute for life." (Clearly, it was a word- choice of Flaubertian care and consideration not to call the film Cinephilia.) No one in his right mind would wish to change places with one of these five, but all together, or even separately, they hold up a yardstick against which to measure your own level of commitment, however thankful or relieved you may be to come up short. One of them, for example, knows the running times of every movie ever made, and owns a collection of vinyl soundtracks encompassing such obscurities as Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon. Another of them follows a men's-room ritual of washing his glasses before each screening, somehow never getting them satisfactorily clean. Still another confesses to shedding tears so continuously at Umbrellas of Cherbourg that he could barely see the screen.
For all five, every week turns into a scheduling nightmare of how to cram the available options into the available hours: "One, two, three films a day, occasionally four or five." Competing film programs must be collated on computer. Travel times by subway are carefully figured. Diet is strictly regulated so as not to hamper the ability to sit still for the necessary duration. It goes without saying that this degree of film buffery is possible only in New York, with such venues to choose from as the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, the Film Forum, the Anthology Film Archives, the Alliance FranÃ§aise, et al. (I knew this sort of person when I lived in New York. I was more that sort of person myself.) Nowhere else today, this side of Paris, could you affect the purism of the lone woman, speaking uncannily in the cadences of John Huston, who refuses to own a television set -- even when she is banished from one venue for repeated acts of truculence. Nowhere else would you have the luxury to disdain the multiplex. Nowhere else on a daily basis will you be asked to choose between, or among, a Fassbinder, a Resnais, a Zurlini, a Hitchcock, a Hou Hsiao-hsien. (No, you wouldn't wish to change places, but you wouldn't mind, now and again, changing choices.) Nowhere else, in a nutshell, is cinephilia put to so stringent a test.
No matter how soon you drop out of competition with these five, no matter how hastily you disavow membership in the club of cinephiliacs, you are nevertheless apt to find that if you are any species of buff at all, you will have a lot of common ground with this group -- a concern with things like print quality, projection standards, the ungodly distraction of popcorn and cell phones -- and that you could much more profitably pass the time with any of these than with, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And even if you never, outside this documentary, had an opportunity to pass the time with them (or their equals), it is in some way good to know that they're out there. Good to know how high the bar has been set. Good to have a rough idea of the ceiling on sanity. The documentary itself, composed of surface- skimming interviews and small-talk duologues ("What's your favorite Esther Williams?"), is not sufficiently cinematic to be worthy of its maniacal subjects. And no one would know this better than they. As one of them sizes it up after a look at the rushes: "It's on video, to begin with, and that's a problem."

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Topic - "Cinemania" -- MUST READ - clarkjohnsen 11:41:21 09/27/03 (2)

"Cinemania" --and a must avoid...nt.. - late 18:43:22 09/27/03 (1)

Like I allus say, no sensa' humor... nt - clarkjohnsen 07:46:46 09/29/03 (0)

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