So, this tweet [awful word, but what can one do?] from Chuck Tryon caught my eye:
AO Scott's article on the canonical films of the 2000s doesn't appear to mention a single female director: http://bit.ly/2ync3e
Yeah, so, any statisticians in the house to explain how that's so?
[Labored sigh.] Whatever. I was reminded of a tab I've kept open [phraseology that meant nothing when I started blogging but bygones] for some time: David Bordwell's post on cinephilia.
A little more than a year ago, ol' Dave took on the topic of cinephilia and ran through a bunch of scenarios [no data on frame rates] detailing how cinephiliacs communicate, using as a model your copains and mine, Jules et Jim [paging Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, to whom I'll return whenever I get around to Bright Star]. Apparently, there's the cooperative game, as well as the competitive games of upmanship, involving the breadth strategy, the longevity strategy, the depth strategy, eloquence, and the insider strategy. [You are forgiven if the copy from televised erectile disfunction medication adverts comes to mind.]
Oh, and there's this:
One last question: Are these games for boys only? Is cinephilia itself defined as a guy’s thing? In my experience, no, not wholly; but mostly. Have women opted out? Do they play it differently? I might have to recast my dialogues in order to include Catherine.
Ah, the mythical female cinephilia [and, of course, the Greek root and its associations seem to make all subsequent questions moot before they are posed]! What does it look like, if it exists at all? And does it entail counting to 10? As we lurch into the end-of-year/decade list-making season, it'll be interesting to see what forms lady-cinephilia takes.
