Crossing the Streams

The moment cinephilia is tied to personal nostalgia, as it is in Martin Scorsese’s essay [“Il Maestro,” March], intellectual distinctions become tenuous. Scorsese laments the devaluing of art as “content” by his philistine employers and by viewers accessing cinema in their homes, yet he has no qualms about admitting that he first saw La Strada on television. Moreover, he grew up with movies as an art form before having to wrestle with them as a business, whereas I grew up in a family of Alabama exhibitors and eventually underwent the opposite trajectory, discovering film…