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The Double Life of Cinephilia

I can hardly mend the schism between my double identities as global, English-language Internet critic and twenty-something film lover who walks down dark hallways to watch movies with fellow porteños.


Guido Pellegrini

I began writing film reviews because of an adolescent impulse. Even when I had more urgent school assignments to attend to, I would still spend hours tailoring write-ups for the latest movies I had seen. Eventually, my need to write about cinema morphed into, simply, a need to write.

When I first began reviewing, my audience mostly consisted of a void, the chaotic void of the Internet, where you can write anything you want, but find no one to read you. Only those who insist, who visit forums, and who connect with fellow cinephiles, can, at long last, start finding a readership. And most of these kindred souls will likely be scattered around the globe.

Film critics and bloggers now have an international audience, and their interactions are equally cosmopolitan. Those who have grown up online can sometimes feel like they have a border-less cinephilia. From an isolated house in Los Angeles, I honed my film love with an Englishman living in Italy, a French-Canadian who mixed brilliant insights with hilarious typos, a New Zealander who had apparently seen every film in existence, a Portuguese restauranteur who would write every other word in italics, and an Australian who preferred men but would make an exception for Audrey Hepburn.

These interactions had the benefit of being multicultural, but the drawback of detaching me from my national context. First in the United States, and then back in my country of origin, Argentina, it would seem to me as if I were leading a double life: local student by day, globe-trotting movie critic by night. Buenos Aires, where I now live, redresses this problem to a degree. Its cinephilia, like its culture and politics, is something physical, something that gestates in its streets. Film clubs abound, projecting movies in secret rooms, neglected theater attics, and roofs under the night sky, where crazed neighbors yell and complain about the midnight soundtrack.

Like modern cinephilia, the Argentine film industry is similarly varied. There is no adequate manifesto to explain the sinister banality of Lucrecia Martel, the intense observation of Lisandro Alonso, the grandiose storytelling of Mariano Llinás, and the talky humanity of Daniel Burman – the term “New Argentine Cinema” is so woefully inappropriate by now – just like I can hardly mend the schism between my double identities as global, English-language Internet critic and twenty-something film lover who walks down dark hallways to watch movies with fellow porteños, as the people of Buenos Aires are called. Maybe there's no mending to be done, only celebration of fragmented joys.


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