I tend to believe that the cultural experiences we encounter in our impressionable youth – the films we see, the music we hear, the books we read – form us in ways that we seldom recognise, scarcely understand, and often resist.

I am not talking here about the movies that we set out to see in the first militant flush of cinephilia – viewings full of expectation, learning and acculturation – but the movies we, in a sense, never meant to see, that were part of no self-advancement programme, but that grip us until the day we die, crystallising some obscure, unconscious part of our identities. Jonathan Richman once sang, so poignantly and memorably, about this moment: “That summer feeling is gonna haunt you / The rest of your life”. At the age of fifteen, I started reading my first film books. I was already nurturing my cinephilia, but had not yet crammed any particular cineliterary taste – I did not (yet) take an imaginary side in the wars between Cahiers du cinéma and Positif or Movie and Screen, I had not yet settled on an allegiance to Manny Farber over Pauline Kael. I read seriously – hungry for knowledge – but also haphazardly.