Motivation and goal

At the end of August, I embarked on a cinephilic pilgrimage to Paris with the intention of visiting as many theatres and locations relevant to the history of cinema and my own personal growth as a film studies student. Equipped with a copy of Pariscope – a weekly magazine featuring screening times and locations – and Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The working life of Jean-Luc Godard my goal was to experience a specifically Parisian cinephilic moment capable of mimicking the testimonies of individual directors, critics and film theorists I had come to admire. In Brody’s book, I had read that Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut regularly attended screenings at the Cinema Mac-Mahon and would often conclude their evening with a trip to a nearby cigar shop and critical discussion on their walk home.

I did not find the cigar shop which I imagine is no longer in business. Yet, I did find the Cinema Mac-Mahon and successfully realized my coveted cinephilic moment.

To be honest, I watched many films over the span of those two weeks and I cannot remember exactly which film is responsible for the cinephilic moment I have alluded to. All I remember is that it was an RKO production, the first I had ever seen on a film print, and the signature beeping of the RKO radio tower before the opening credits. I remember the generic ticket I held in my hand, the painted night sky covering the theatre ceiling and the bright red seats and walls surrounding the screen. The title of the film was of little importance: I was watching an RKO picture at the Cinema Mac-Mahon.

While seated in the theatre, two things became very clear to me. Firstly, the structuring of my cinephilic moment was directly linked to my knowledge of film history, acknowledgment of the artifice and my own subjectivity. Secondly, I left the theatre convinced I understood how Classical Hollywood Cinema proved so capable of captivating French audiences and film critics, and providing a formative basis for developments in film theory during the 1960s. The avocation of Hollywood auteurs at Cahiers du Cinema provided an immediate critical framework and, consequently, opposition during the politically activated years of the late 1960s – one only has to trace the changes in editorship, layout, and theoretical objectives at the magazine to realize this.

As far as I could tell, the Cinema Mac-Mahon provided the perfect viewing environment for Hollywood classics and, as indicated by its current mission, it continues to do so.

The goal of The Pleasure Project is not to simply provide another web-based avenue for the appreciation of cinema; rather, the goal is to examine such appreciation and to gather testimonies from individuals fully aware of the theoretical implications of the cinematic experience. In doing so, we seek to embrace the subjective experience of the film spectator, to displace the films in discussion from their original context and to examine cinema as a complex cultural vessel that continues to become even more impossible to identify. Ideally, for the sake of simplicity, the individual testimonies should demonstrate a sense of consistency and reiteration of Hollywood’s dominance allowing for the application of film theory in a decisive manner. However, such is not the case, and the following interviews only serve to emphasize the individual complexity of contemporary cinephiles, and the cultural, historical and subjective consideration they necessarily demand.

Matthias Mushinski