Melissa Anderson at Bookforum:
I HAVE FREQUENTLY BEEN SEATED in the dark near those who have variously been called “the pilly-sweater crowd,” “cinemaniacs,” or “Titus-heads” (referring to the two main movie theaters at MoMA). They are pejorative terms for a certain type of New York City cinephile, one whose zeal for the seventh art seems to have been leached of all pleasure and has instead transmogrified into grim compulsion. Demographically, they are often (but not always) white, male, and middle-aged or older.
The eponymous protagonist of Jeremy Cooper’s novel Brian fits that profile, yet he is a Londoner. At age thirty-nine he becomes a “buff” or a “regular” at the BFI Southbank (known as the National Film Theatre from 1951 to 2007), anodyne terms that he accepts, though “categories and titles worried him, a form, he felt, of social control.” When his colleagues at the Camden Housing Department (where he is responsible for keeping lease and freehold records up to date) call him a “movie geek,” he recoils at the expression, “prepar[ing] in response the simple description of himself as a man who loved cinema.”
more here.