“I would advise every older scholar to tell his public the basic experiences underlying his methods.” Thus spake Leo Spitzer, the great philologist famous for his focus on the little details that make up an author’s style. For some time, I have been old enough, male enough, and in the right profession, to consider myself directly addressed by this invitation (standing since the year I was born), but I never had any inclination to accept it. My idea of the experiences that determined a critical practice—or any adult commitment, for that matter—involved far more basic events than the academic course of study to which Spitzer, not taking his advice very far, proceeded to reduce his own method’s origin story. Even supposing I could fake his assurance, I was too skeptical of his reliance on voluntary memory to think that I should ever retrieve, between my method and my experience, any link of real importance. But suddenly there came a point when I understood that this method was no mere method for me; it was also, and had always been, a sort of design for living. It didn’t just have certain select life experiences behind it of the kind Spitzer was enjoining me to recount. It was itself a way of telling—and reflecting on—my entire life story, and that story was ongoing. Throughout my professional career, I had apparently been doing one of two equally perverse things: either I had been secretly writing autobiography in the alien mode of criticism, or I had been cynically strip-mining my life for the sole sake of ever-finer hermeneutic discriminations. The ambiguity needed articulating—and whether I declaimed in Spitzer’s amphitheater, or whispered in the alcove where criticism is now conducted, or just talked to myself at home like a crazy, my acoustics could stand improvement.
“But suddenly there came a point”: the point at which I reread the contents of this book. With these short DVD reviews (all but the last written for my Film Quarterly column called “Second Time Around”), I had turned my writing to a new subject and a smaller scale, and like going abroad or looking at miniatures, the retrospect revealed habits that were too natural or contours that were simply too large to have been recognized before. At the outset, only one such discovery needs to be shared: namely, that I tend to imagine my critical work as a series of returns. Sometimes, quite literally, I have returned to authors and texts more than once: my multiple Austens, Bartheses, and Hitchcocks. But sometimes, even though I am writing on a subject for the first time, I set it up as a return: here is David Copperfield, for example, or the Broadway musical—old familiar things about which I am now having (unnerving phrase if ever there was!) “second thoughts.” And sometimes the subject keeps coming back without even being named in the uncredited form of frequent, always shifting allusion: hidden Poe, hidden Kinbote. The “Second Time Around” column, full of returns to old art films, is itself the return of a column I wrote on then new art films as a Cambridge student. In sum, almost all my writing has proceeded under the beleaguered assumption that everything needs to be done twice.
And why? Because it wasn’t done properly to begin with! It is as if everything I write is a sort of repair work, an attempt to revisit a somehow fractured (spoiled, disparaged, lost) first encounter, whether to fix it or, failing that, to affirm that I have survived it and am ready for a second round. But this repair work, in laying bare the old impairments, shames, and privations, never quite lays them to rest but seems instead to invite further repair work … on itself! We know from Proust that the second trip to Balbec is as disappointing as the first, but—here’s the rub—it’s disappointing in different ways. I, too, seem incapable of imagining I’ll ever get a visit right.
But if you’ve read many first-person narratives, or even tested a few online dating profiles, you’ll know to be wary of those who tell their own story. Feel free to read a different one between the lines; I, too, will be telling other versions of the second-time narrative as this book goes along. But I tell it this way first to justify the present introduction, which I have written twice. The first time (in “The Cinematheque Today,” which follows) I simply attempted to post, as forcibly as possible, my Lutheran theses regarding the new cinematheque and its typical DVD reissue. But by the end of it, I found myself wanting to write it over, this time (under the title “The Second Time Around”) as a reflection not on my subject matter but on myself as a subject in relation to it. For my early passion for watching films—and art films, in particular—was a passion in the double sense, divided between an acceptable enthusiasm and a more intricate secret suffering, and that split provided the main impetus to see them—and to write about seeing them—a second time. My Janus-faced introduction will make explicit the poles—objective and subjective, critical and confessional—between which, in a continuing attempt to abolish the opposition, the columns oscillate.