Anyone bored with this cinephile/cineaste discussion as silly, a waste of
time, parochila, etc etc, is free to start a new thread. In the meantime ...
I take various people's points about dictionaries, derivations and usages,
and I would not dare question David's Oxford-educated girlfriend! (But I
could have done without the 'thinking like Bush' smear: I tend to associate
Bush with crimes against language, not any attempt to straighten out
corrupted meanings.) But: in my experience, when people say "I am a
cineaste" - often it's "I'm a filmmaker and a cineaste" - they are NOT aware
of two meanings and are thus choosing one according to context, they ONLY
think it means 'film buff/lover', and thus what they MEAN to say is
cinephile! So they are using the wrong word, a use arising from a
long-propagated misunderstanding!
By the way, nor do I believe that mise en scène should always have hyphens!
It doesn't in French. It is only convention that dictates - and not
systematically - that they appear in English. I am doubtless up against the
dictionaries and Oxford post-grads again on this ... It looks so inelegant
with hypens, anyhow.
By the way, I am not the only person who objects to 'cineaste'
indiscriminately meaning 'cinephile' in English! In a discussion on the
group 'A Film By', Jonathan Rosenbaum also threw in with this movement of
reform; I previously mentioned Gilbert Adair's piece about it from 1980; and
Jean-Pierre Coursodon (co-author with Tavernier of the massive 50 YEARS OF
AMERICAN CINEMA and long a USA citizen) was able to pinpoint the moment in
AMERICAN journalistic history when this mistake was first made (and then
inevitably crossed the seas to Australia, Oxford, etc).
But I'm still waiting to hear from our book reviewer what Schleupmann may
have initially meant by these terms ...
irreversible Adrian
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