'Like most people, the pandemic has meant I spend more time online. I’ve found Twitter to be a great resource: the feeds of many writers and cinephiles have come to function as intimate COVID viewing records that I enjoy reading and learning from. As I spottily keep my own, my time spent on Twitter has made me interrogate my own cinephilic anxieties and performances: namely being perceived as ‘serious about film,’ or knowledgeable enough about it. Why was I documenting, posting, and liking Criterion Channel viewing and less frequently sharing equally memorable experiences, such as watching the critically panned The Goldfinch (John Crowley, 2019) on videoconference with giggling friends; or the amount of hours I spent in the bath watching television via a laptop propped up on a chair? Recently, I crafted a pretentious (albeit genuine) tweet about my first time enjoyment of Atom Egoyan’s Calendar (1993) and its use of essay film conventions within narrative cinema. I loved Calendar deeply but the way in which I was positing myself, constructing myself, and articulating myself as a certain kind of film viewer felt silly, when my marathon of the Scream franchise was equally surprising and generative. Perhaps, however, this is what’s most fascinating about media discourses on Twitter: a place in which the seemingly ‘highbrow’ and popular are juxtaposed, their divisions both upheld and dissolved.' (Introduction)
