“I moved to New York three days before the Fassbinder retrospective,” recalls Bill, one of the five people whose compulsive moviegoing habits form the subject of Cinemania. Anyone likely to be reading these words probably has a similar recollection. For me, July of 2000—my first summer in New York—will forever be marked by the Walter Reade Theater’s Alain Resnais retrospective, where I immediately drowned myself in the kind of paradise I’d always imagined the city to be. This is precisely the kind of intensely personal yet meaningless fact that cinephiles are constantly generating and sharing with one another (if they have any friends), and if you want to stock up on a year’s worth of such tidbits, dispensed by people who truly seem to have nothing else in their lives, then you may find this documentary perversely fascinating. Otherwise I recommend giving this depressing, misleading, and unintentionally condescending film a wide berth.

If you even occasionally frequent any of the locations glimpsed in Cinemania (Anthology Film Archives, Film Forum, AMMI), chances are you’ve seen these people for yourself: Jack, Eric, Bill, Harvey, and Roberta. (As with a twelve-step program, I will use only their first names.) More than likely you’ve considered changing seats to get away from them, particularly Harvey and his unceasing childish chuckle. This raises the sticky question of why anyone from New York would actually want to see a film about these people when they can get the real thing for free out there, and at least get to see a good movie in the process. (At the Tribeca Film Festival screening I attended, the participants were both on the screen and in the audience, an experience too creepy to recount.) At the same time, the filmmakers take the highly specific NYC repertory/museum circuit as such a given it’s unlikely that viewers in other cities will be able to make heads or tails of it. The film’s first major shortcoming is this refusal to place anything in a context, not just the pathetic lives of its characters but the system of non-profit institutions that allows them to lead this existence of relatively cheap nonstop filmgoing. (Cheap is crucial, since only one of the five seems to have a job. Three others live off disability insurance, and the fifth from an inheritance.) We learn nothing about what these institutions are or where they came from, how the life a New York cinephile is drastically different now than it was just twenty years ago when the older art-house system of repertory programming still existed, not to mention the Museum of Modern Art and the crucial role it has played in the cinematic life of the city. This, of course, would have required actual research on the part of the filmmakers, when instead they are content to stand back and let the participants unknowingly humiliate themselves while basking in the visible pride that someone has at last deemed what they do interesting.

In the guise of making an affectionate, Errol Morris-type documentary in which some dedicated oddballs directly relate their obsessions to the camera, Christlieb and Kijak have actually struck a blow against an already ailing culture of cinephilia by substituting pathology for passion, focusing on individuals in a state of arrested development as filmgoers and human beings. (Their dumbed-down title is telling, as is the cheesy title song performed by Stereo Total.) I don’t want to turn this review into a critique of the real lives of certain people, but as a cinephile I am slightly appalled that a handful of lunatics are being used to stand in for a very real way of life for many more people than the film bothers to acknowledge exist. The cynical implication is that to care about something as deeply as the subjects of this film do, you’d have to be crazy.

Nevertheless, each of the five participants does a have a moment or two of real emotion, clarity, or at least genuine humor about their condition that briefly overtakes their generally pitiable circumstances. I especially enjoyed Roberta’s chiding the filmmakers for shooting on video instead of film, while Jack’s evocation of “weeping for blocks and blocks” walking home after seeing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for the first time indicates a depth of feeling and emotional investment in cinema that mostly seems missing from everyone else, filmmakers and subjects alike. But these are the exceptions, while the rule tends to be scenes like Bill’s attempt at a personal ad (addressed to French women, so he can move to Paris and watch movies there, naturally) which quickly devolves into a catalogue of the directors he enjoys, Roberta showing off her Jurassic Park plastic cups, or Harvey’s huge collection of soundtrack LPs for which he has no turntable to play them on—in other words, the same hipster indie-doc real-life mockumentary dreck that has become the depressing standard.

When I think about a real cinephile, I think about the young Henri Langlois collecting what would become the Cinematheque Française in his family’s bathroom, or Langlois’s own “Children of the Cinematheque” taking to the streets in February 1968 to protest his dismissal, or even the story recounted by Samuel Fuller of Steven Spielberg driving around with a print of his Hell or High Water in the trunk of his car. In each of these cases and many others the crucial distinction is that the passion for cinema reaches a point where it must manifest itself in some way beyond mere attendance at screenings, be it cultism, criticism, or filmmaking. In the textbook example of the Nouvelle Vague generation, the result was all three. Writing about the importance of film cults in forming the canon, Peter Wollen noted “The key transition occurs when they, so to speak, ‘go public’ and begin to argue the merits of their canon with outsiders instead of just celebrating them in semi-private cenacles.” The existence of this film notwithstanding, the last thing the people in Cinemania seem likely to do is “go public” with anything besides their own neuroses. Far from it, as Bill selfishly announces, “We are the people that these great films are being made for.” Locked away inside each of these lonely, isolated unfortunates is a treasure trove of knowledge and experience that seems destined to remain locked away.
—ERIK SYNGLE