For a certain kind of youth, the accumulation of taste becomes the crucible of self, the battleground on which character is formed. [...]
[...] By leafing through these magazines together we shared a mood of sweet latency, imagining the films we had in store, like provincials dreaming of life in the capital. Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us. The waiting had something to do with the nature of a…
I rushed to see L'Avventura. It was the movie I had been preparing for, and it came at the right time in my development. As a child, I had wanted only action movies. Dialogues and story setups bored me; I waited for that moment when the knife was hurled through the air. My awakening in adolescence …
Whether the film had been glorious or dull barely mattered, so long as I could cross it off my list. The development of a taste of any sort requires plodding through the overrated as well as uncovering the sublime. If the movie had been genuinely great, I would leave the screening place inspired an…
Finally, the book is autobiographical in the sense that it reflects the changes I have gone through, emotionally and physically, over the years. When I was a young man I could be more easily seduced by the pure sensuousness of the visual: give me an Ophulsian camera movement and you had me in your …
