Film Matters Magazine

C is for Cinema, but that is admittedly too broad of a subject, so I will narrow it down to the time in which, for most, cinephilia begins: childhood. I am around five years old. I am with my sister, or my mother. The movie is High School Musical. I don’t remember the plot, as the hour-and-thirty-eight-minute film was too long for me to control my attention span. However, this movie is my first experience escaping from my living room and joining the world on the screen in my living room. I am a part of every dance routine, and I am even on the court dribbling the basketball with Troy Bolton and the Wildcats. Every longing gaze Troy aimed at Gabriella is not for her, but for me, a five-year-old who has now discovered the feeling of a celebrity crush. I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen.^[i] This movement of dance and music affects me. I am forced to care deeply about a cast of characters for the first time in my life. Maybe C should be for connection. Connection is the catalyst of cinephilia.

E is for encounter, and exchange, which are one and the same. E is also for “eyes,” those objects through which our encounters and exchanges take place: eyes through screens, eyes glancing toward cameras, eyes deliberately not glancing toward cameras, eyes closing. The acknowledgement of a screen, the slow eyelid droop of an afternoon nap. Encounter is, first and foremost, about what we see.

Collectively Composed by Victor Bowman-Rivera, Linh Ngoc Bui, Andrenae Jones, Annie Martin, Quillan Qian, Anniyah Rawlins, and Kailyn Shepherd 

With thanks to Professor Amelie Hastie for organizing our contributions to this Preface

Let us assume, to begin with, that films themselves engage in the art of description. Just as poets describe the world, so do film makers – with all the technological possibilities available to them.

— Lesley Stern

We hope you will read the following essays, produced for our fall 2021 Amherst College course “The Film Essay,” and see only a sliver of the full breadth of what can be achieved when writing about film. Of course, film criticism isn’t just the rushed scribbles that only barely answer the all-too-prompted question of “Well, how did you like it?” Film criticism, or well-written film criticism, is concise, patient, and curious. But that doesn’t have to mean that film criticism must be constricted in its form, in how it is communicated from one mind to another. We write “criticism” not just to break apart but to accompany, to add harmonies melodically, and to continue traveling with the films we’ve seen. We do it for the love of the feelings we felt in the work of art, for the love of words and the spaces they can transport us into, the emotions they can at times capture and transmit.