Jean Louis Schefer’s object is a more elemental lure of moving images that is most acute in childhood and adolescence. Not a love of cinema so much as desire for it, a desire deeply tinged with anxiety. For Schefer, this is a central theme: The attraction to cinema is inextricable from fear. This experience, both ordinary and yet felt to be deeply personal, is rooted in those first isolated experiences in the dark that persist insofar as cinema returns us so-called adults to that primal scene of childhood yearning, terror, and, yes, pleasure, but a pleasure never far from unease and guilt.

But cinema is addressed to an “interior history,” an “invisible chamber,” “an unexpressed part of ourselves” to which our consciousness does not have direct access.