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"Perhaps poetry replaces something in me that others receive more naturally," Linda Gregg once wrote, and poetry, both in Gregg's conception and in the context of what we're discussing here, should be defined as something other than verse.  Cinephiles are, by nature, outsiders.  They study the images of pasts remembered and made-up, where even their backyards become something strange and far-off.  As a practice it remains, rightly or wrongly, a rejection of living life moment-to-moment or day-by-day--instead, it's a way of slipping into the dreams of others, of glimpsing, however briefly, all the not-quite-realities that will never be their own.  What Gregg's "others" receive through work or community or family the cinephile receives by watching people they will never know.

  --Peter Lenihan