These days, few people would admit that they can't stand movies. Cinema continues to offer the most seductive blend of the spectacular and the contemplative. Almost any film can be approached as a dazzling distraction or as material for intellectual heavy lifting; those familiar with the Freudian-flavored analyses of the Slovenian philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek or the writings of Madison's own David Bordwell know that no movie is out of bounds for theoretical scrutiny. The pluralistic appeal of cinema is especially curious when one considers how unpopular literature is today as a leisurely pursuit. Movies remain attractive to both the attention-deficit and attention-surplus crowds. However, this isn't to suggest that film audiences of the world stand united.
As with all the other arts, there are casual fans of cinema and there are devotees. The obsessed are commonly known as ""cinephiles"" and, as you might expect, they tend to watch as many movies as possible as often as possible. They are utterly driven; the impossible goal of ""seeing it all"" leads them to spend the afternoon on a samurai epic directed by Akira Kurosawa, the early evening with a musical orchestrated by Busby Berkeley and the wee hours of the morning in a pop nightmare ripped from David Lynch's unconscious. Casual viewers simply are not as comfortable hiking through film history in this manner, but why is that?
""Seeing it all"" is a very different proposition than ""hearing it all"" or ""reading it all."" Passionate music listeners are rarely satisfied after just one encounter with a complex composition or an idea-stuffed LP. Reading the entire Western canon is impossible, because there's nothing literary-types enjoy more than demolishing the canon or loading it up with the works of authors like James Joyce, whose three-novel oeuvre alone could easily consume a lifetime.
With each film watched, the cinephile gets the sense, however illusory, that progress is made toward the goal of having experienced every significant work produced in the medium. For casual fans and cinephiles alike, the determining factor in choosing to see a movie is often how long it'll take to do so. Watching a film is usually a two-hour time commitment: This measurement is definite and almost universally recognized. As an activity, film-viewing is inherently temporal; in the age of YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, TCM, DVRs and BitTorrent, time is often the only currency one needs to exchange to access a film. Indeed, this notion that one's time is a valuable commodity that might be better spent on something other than cinema is precisely what distinguishes casual fans from cinephiles.
Most cinephiles—or at least the self-proclaimed ones—wouldn't think twice about seeing two or three films a day; most casual fans would consider ""two or three a day"" a regimen fit only for an obsessive. But if I may be so bold as to ask a question in the style of Gertrude Stein: Why is one's time one's time? So much post-Enlightenment thought has treated humans as beings whose every feature is essentially finite. Marx's argument that workers in the Industrial Age are inherently alienated is predicated upon the idea that humans get only so much time to live, thus making time as important a commodity as money, food, clothing, shelter and sex.
But even Marx assumed that time is something that belongs to you, something you can easily lose and rarely gain. In other words, ""time"" becomes ""my time,"" an infinitely more valuable thing to possess because, as theorists interested in the origins of representational art have often argued, man is nothing if not a big ol' narcissist. Being frugal with one's time only seems to prevent us from wasting it; college students are well-versed in the art of aimlessly dicking around, yet it doesn't always occur to them that whatever they're doing would seem frivolous to others.
The real distinction between the cinephile and the casual fan is that the cinephile is convinced that every film is uniquely worthwhile while the casual fan is scared by the potential for regret if—horror of all horrors—the film turns out to be a dud.
This desire to avoid feeling regretful deflects our attention from a more interesting set of questions about film spectatorship: How does watching two or three films a day affect one's digestion of those films? How much can one really get out of a film if it's seen as part of a triple feature? How much time should be spent contemplating a film before one can move on to the next film?
It'd be nice if we could rid ourselves of this notion that ""my"" time is so precious, so delicate, so frighteningly valuable. There's no greater waste of time than trying to decide what to do with it.
Want to get yourself on the two-to-three-films-a-day regimen? E-mail Dan at dasullivan@wisc.edu.
