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 and pleasantly conscious of my isolation, and wander the streets for a while before taking the subway home. I came to love the way the gray city streets looked after a movie, the cinematic blush they seemed to wear. When the film had been a disappointment -- well then, all the more was it a joy to get back to the true world, with its variety and uncanny compositions.

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 to the art of film consisted precisely in overcoming this impatience. Overcompensating, perhaps; I now loved a cinema that dawdled, that lingered. Antonioni had a way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape. With his detachment from the human drama and his tasteful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced me to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique. Of course the story held me, too, with its bitter, world-weary, disillusioned tone. The adolescent wants to touch bottom, to know the worst. His soul craves sardonic disenchantment.

[...] 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 adolescence itself; it also reflected the resurgence of European films at the time.

To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, whee the cinema had moved, for a brief historical movement, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism.

For a certain kind of youth, the accumulation of taste becomes the crucible of self, the battleground on which character is formed. [...]

It is a truism that moviegoing can become a substitute for living. Not that I regret one hour spent watching movies, then or now, since the habit persists to this day, but I would not argue either if someone wanted to maintain that chronic moviegoing often promotes a passivity before life, a detached tendency to aestheticize reality, and, I suppose, a narcissistic absorption that makes it harder to contact others. [...]