Watch: A Video Essay on How To Be a Cinephile

Am I a "film nerd," or cinephile? Possibly, or probably. My earliest experiences of film were at a very young age, with Fisher-Price filmstrips you could watch in a small viewer, and which I tended to watch over and over. Fast forward a decade or so, and foreign films entered in: Ingmar Bergman. Federico Fellini. Werner Herzog. And, very importantly, Truffaut. This open-hearted video essay by Shannon Strucci instructs the viewer on how to be a cinephile; this part of what will be a multi-part series focuses largely on the work of Francois Truffaut, starting with his work as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema and moving forward to his immortal film work. I could not be happier about the deference Strucci shows to The 400 Blows, a film I have always found fascinating from beginning to end–and which, if I’m allowed to indulge a cliche, "speaks" to everybody, to universally felt moments of pain and triumph. There are times, after all, when all you can do is run, as Antoine Doinel does–either into the distance or into the ocean of film itself.