C.S. Leigh’s Evolving Cinephilia

In the current issue of The Believer, the multi-talented artist, writer, filmmaker and mysteriously elusive C.S. Leigh contemplates the “New Physicality of Cinema.”  In part, it’s a nostalgic physicality that embraces the common experience of actual movie going, rather than receiving; the crowded-theater, group dynamic can transform our experience of a film. Leigh savors the pre-digital cult of curiosity that once  drove like-minded aesthetes to seek out the most obscure art films, scripts and viewings around the globe. Physicality of cinema includes, of course, the theatre itself—and, for Leigh in particular, the decaying, smokey, “fetid” theaters of urban yesteryear—and how it defined each film, for better or worse. He also considers the layers of remove between the viewer, the director and the characters, and the shared subject that joins them. But how, Leigh wonders, will we love the new, “post-cinematic cinema,” as brief and fleeting as it is readily available? His answer is unpredictable and strangely optimistic.