A free masonry of cinephiles...

I'd come to Paris for a year to study French. But it was here that I got my real education. I became a member of what in those days was kind of a free masonry. A free masonry of cinephiles... what we'd call "film buffs." I was one of the insatiables...  the ones you'd always find sitting closest to the screen.
 Why do we sit so close?  Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first... when they were still new, still fresh... before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us... before they'd been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator... until worn-out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp... it returned to the projectionist's cabin.Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us... from the world.

The Dreamers (2003) by Bernardo Bertolucci