On the distinction between being a cinephile and being a film buff and why the distinction matters.

A film buff has seen a large number of films and can discuss them with enthusiasm and reasonable accuracy. A cinephile's relationship to film is more invested: the formal language of cinema, its history, its theory, its cultural significance.

This distinction sounds snobbish but it isn't meant to be. Being a film buff is excellent. The enthusiast who has seen every Marvel film twelve times and can discuss the craft differences between directors knows something real about popular cinema that pure cinephile culture misses.

The problem comes when these two modes talk past each other. Cinephile culture sometimes treats casual enthusiasm as failed cinephilism, as if film appreciation is a hierarchy rather than a range of relationships with the same medium.

What I want to argue is that both modes serve the medium and that the best film culture is the one where both coexist: where someone who grew up watching blockbusters can be introduced to Yasujiro Ozu without being made to feel that their previous viewing history was wrong, and where someone who has only seen Ozu can watch Mad Max: Fury Road with genuine pleasure.