Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:
There was a period in my twenties when I found it important to adopt the attitudes and dispositions of a cinephile. I drove to Tower Records on Broadway in Downtown Sacramento, fifteen miles both ways, to rent VHS tapes of the works of F. W. Murnau, Satyajit Ray, Carl Theodor Dreyer. I considered it a great virtue to sit through hours of Stan Brakhage’s abstractions. I was, in truth, deeply bored by Yasujiro Ozu’s quiet people with their little lives, but I took the willingness to endure this boredom likewise as a mark of a special species of virtue — the cinephile virtue. (I have rewatched Ozu in more recent years and have found his work utterly compelling.) I strained to read the Cahiers du Cinéma, barely understanding a word, but loving the adoration those French intellos were willing to shower upon, say, Clint Eastwood, or, in the back catalogue of issues, the love that poured forth from François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Melville for the most common run of American policiers. It seemed to me that cinephilia, in the particular form it took in the twentieth century, was the most thriving and generous bastion of true humanism, where it was generally understood to be something best expressed in sensibility and attention, rather than in any particular concrete message. No one, I still think, embodied this humanism more fully than Jean Renoir.
More here.