The highlights of The Believer's 1999 Film Issue are conveniently located at the front and back of the magazine, and are perhaps even more conveniently available online. In an essay titled "Contemplating the New Physicality of Cinema", C. S. Leigh discusses "the physical act of seeking out and consuming great or hallowed or mythical films"--"the rumors traded among cinephiles, the stories and the clues"--and the degree to which this process "was as obsessive as our need to experience these films, when and if we found them", and the role it played in shaping the sensibility of many a movie geek (or, if you prefer, "cinephile"--you say tomato, I say tomahto). "We wrote letters to long-forgotten crew members of neglected masterpieces and arranged meetings in difficult-to-pronounce European cities still shrouded behind the Iron Curtain. We sent money orders or contraband to shady PO boxes in hopes of hitting the mother lode. (That’s how I got my hands on Bergman’s Merry Widow script, crafted as a showcase for Barbra Streisand and set aside when it could not be financed.) Did Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-forty-minute version of Out 1, noli me tangere, supposedly screened at Le Havre in 1971, really exist? Could sequences from the abandoned version of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the one starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (before Robards had a massive heart attack and Klaus Kinski replaced him), be bought on black-market videotape? Where could we find films of the Marxist couple Straub-Huillet with English subtitles when the filmmakers themselves had sought to keep their work free of the textual residue of the despised Anglo-American market?"

This kind of obsession-fueling trivia, and the will to journey to "dark and damp basement cinemas in New York, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Berlin, and London, places like the Carnegie Hall Cinema, the Cinema Village, and the Notting Hill, where double features were the order of the day," were often an essential part of the experience of devoting a large part of your life to feeding on movies before the budding addict had fully formed his or her aesthetic code or film sense. Before one has learned to talk the talk, one walks the walk by demonstrating one's willingness to go wherever it takes, pay whatever price, subsist on concession-counter Milk Duds with whatever outmoded expiration date printed on the side, to track down that precious film experience the that has been dangling just out of reach. For the true, well, believer, one's autobiography becomes a string of screenings, some of them at least as memorable for their surroundings as for the movie that occasioned them. As Leigh recalls, "You could also have a very different relationship with a film depending on where and with whom you watched it. An audience at a university cinema in L.A. had a solemn, nearly funereal reaction to Pasolini’s Salò, based on Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (they seemed uncertain whether they had just witnessed a film or a crime); later, I watched the same film at the Accattone in Paris with an audience that couldn’t stop laughing. I watched my first Philippe Garrel film, Les Hautes solitudes, starring Jean Seberg and largely based on her turbulent life story, at the old Cinémathèque Française near Trocadéro. It’s a silent film with an amazing lexicon of bohemian costars, including Nico, Tina Aumont, and Laurent Terzieff, in its cast. What I remember most clearly is the look of sheer terror washing over Seberg’s face in one of those endless black-and-white close-ups on which Garrel built his reputation, and, equally, the mildewy smell of the underground cinema. It had yet to decay to the point where it would become uninhabitable, even for the faithful. When I watched the film there again in 2004 it was pretty much raining inside."

The Believer web site also includes the full text of Chloe Veltman's interview with Mike Leigh Other worthwhile reasons for picking up the magazine itself include the enclosed DVD devoted to Jean-Luc Godard's visits to the United States, including his visits to college campuses in 1968 and 1979 and his 1980 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to promote Every Man for Himself, an interview with Julie Delpy, in which she confesses her desire to be on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and a too-small and too-brief but tantalizing selection (by Michael Atkinson) of Polish film posters. In the not-so-much category, we have one more interview with the pretty much all-talked-out John Sayles, which will be a revelation to anyone who has never imagined that the indie auteur is too devoted to a talky cinema of quality to be content being caged as a Hollywood screenwriter; William Giraldi's disappointing piece on The Exorcist; and an article about Incubus, Leslie Stevens's 1966 horror curio Incubus (starring William Shatner, and written in Esperanto) which adds little to the classic Salon report that was accompanied on the occasion of the movie's 2000 reappearance on home video.

Then there's Believer co-editor Heidi Julavits's interview with Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes. Mendes seems a little "New York Times Arts & Leisure section" for an enterprise like The Believer, but Julavits treats him very respectfully, honoring his high seriousness as a man of culture and fellow reader by mostly asking him about the role that the Richard Yates novel that served as the basis for his latest overpraised movie has played in the life of his mind. Oddly enough, she never got around to asking him about his forthcoming film, Away We Go, which Mendes directed and produced from a script by a brand new screenwriting team: Dave Eggers, whose company, McSweeney's, publishes The Believer, and his wife, the co-founder and co-editor of The Believer, Vendela Vidi. I can only imagine that when Julavits and Vidi were comparing notes on the new issue as it was about to go to press and they discovered that it contained a beyond-friendly interview with someone who had just ushered Eggers and Vidi into the movie business, there was much discussion about what a small world it is and a good chuckle was enjoyed by one and all.