Bill Stamets

What could be wrong with people who watch two, three, four or five films a day? In their kindly and clunky video documentary, Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak follow five obsessive filmgoers who calibrate their subway itineraries--and in one case an intentionally constipated diet to eliminate bathroom interruptions--to maximize their screen intake at New York City cinemas. Shot on digital video, an acknowledged irritant to its subjects' celluloid fetish, "Cinemania" is a hermetic immersion in lives spent in the dark. Interaction with off-screen humanity seems limited to chastising imprecise projectionists, noisy popcorn-munchers and ticket stub-tearers. As a documentary about an odd side of American movie culture, "Cinemania" brings to mind "Hell's Highway," a recent documentary about the making of driver's-ed films which ended up sharing the naive style and unseemly preoccupations of productions like "Mechanized Death." Christlieb and Kijak sympathize with their articulate--if clinically speaking, impaired--cinemaniacs, and this German-funded video echoes their distracted vistas in its own disheveled editing. Once past a twitchy opening that risks trivializing the natives, their ethnographic video lets some lovable sociopaths make a case for their compulsive escapism. BetaSP. 83m.

"Cinemania" opens Friday for a week at Facets. (2003-09-04)

Also by Bill Stamets

Tip of the Week
For his first feature and documentary debut, Jeff Spitz directs a deeply appealing and wisely edited portrait of eight American kids from eight very different American families who strive to spell better than any other kid in the country.
(2003-05-14)

Tip of the Week
One artist's encounter with another artist--filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer observing sculptor Andy Goldsworthy-- allows a wondrous witnessing of art-making.
(2003-03-12)

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