DOCTOR SAYS I HAVE CINEPHILIA
Dear Doctor Lecter,
I’m writing to inform you I won’t need your services any longer.
Not only do I firmly believe that there’s no cure for my condition, but I also claim the right to enjoy it.
I’ve been diagnosed with CINEPHILIA, therefore I refuse to believe that a word composed by the suffix “philia”, the Greek word for love, could be considered a mental disorder.
Nevertheless, I’m aware that love itself, is considered to be an illness. Literature and poetry have often described love as a kind of madness, with similar symptoms caused by drugs such as cocaine and other substances that end in -ine.
Your predecessor, Sigmund Freud himself said: “isn’t what we mean by ‘falling in love’ a kind of sickness and craziness, an illusion, a blindness to what the loved person is really like?”. (He also said that we fall in love with something with a quality that we wish to have/be)
We don’t have much in common, but we do share something: the human condition, the worst illness of all.
So let me be ill with pride and joy! Let me indulge in my reverie! Let me dance with the gods, from shot to shot.
Love, is to love in a particular way. I’ll illustrate you mine.
You see, every average Joe can discover a masterpiece, but only a cinephile could uncover the glories, all the more wondrous for being hidden, of minor, even failed work that might be refashioned, if only by force of will, into greatness of another kind, perhaps even a better kind.
Ah, those images.
Words pour forth most often as a stream of consciousness or Freudian free association indicating a keen awareness that even the poetry of certain words could never quite convey the poetry of an image.
Cinephilia is the art of seeing in movies what others don’t see. Hitchcock’s beauty of form, the maniacal symmetry of Kubrick, the tenderness under the surface of some of Bunuel’s cruellest films, the old-fashioned elegance of Woody Allen, the perverse intellect of Otto Preminger, the colourful apartments of Almodovar’s grey women, that haze of Fellini movies.
And there she is. Jeanne Moreau, seen through a glass, lightly. The bitter tears of Jean D’Arc. Audrey Hepburn’s slow-motioned smile.
Life can be so miserable, compared to movies. Without the fact that it lasts much longer.
Near the beginning of Bertolucci’s film The Dreamers – among other things an ode to cinephilia – a lonely young American in 1960s Paris haunts the Cinémathèque, lapping up movies, always sitting in the front rows so that, as he says, he can capture the image before anyone else.
It is a beautiful form of addiction; an eclectic, voracious, impassioned, if not a little sentimental way of dealing with the unthinkable, life.
For a cinephile, even a truly awful movie is almost as good as a really great one, and infinitely preferable to a simply mediocre one. But then again, doesn’t this philosophy apply to anything else?
A film embraces moments of quiet euphoria and makes of those moments a private, shared mythology. The image. The idea of the image itself is sublime. My heart is pounding. It makes my hand reach for a tranquillizer.
But maybe, dear Dr Lecter, I tell myself that you might be right after all. My condition is in a certain way, a form of fetishism rather than a form of love. It is clear that the aura of movies is what I cherish the most. I want to possess the movies, not to own them.
See you at the next session.
Sincerely,
Lorna May
