It All Began With James Bond: My Love Affair With Cinema – Pt 1

By Belen Maluenda | June 30, 2020

I can remember the day in which I fell in love with movies. Little five-year-old me wandered into my parents’ room, where my dad was watching something by himself. Curious, I looked at the screen and saw a man climbing into a bright yellow helicopter not much bigger than a motorcycle. Interest piqued.

“Papa, que estas viendo?” what are you watching, I asked. My dad knew he wouldn’t get anywhere explaining to me who James Bond was. Instead, in an ingenious burst of daddish wit, he explained that the movie was essentially about a really cool guy who had to defeat an evil bald guy who lived inside a volcano. I was riveted.

It was there, curled up next to my dad, that I watched You Only Live Twice, my first Bond film. The real-world exotic locations, the action, the car chases, the gadgets: it was unlike anything I had ever seen in my usual animated Disney fare. My little-girl-eyes were awestruck and begged to see more.

A Gateway Drug

James Bond became my childhood obsession. As my grade school friends can attest, I drew the double-O-seven logo everywhere and found ways to craft it into most school art projects. In middle school, my most prized possession was a replica of the Vesper Lynd necklace from Casino Royale, a birthday present from my parents.

My dad reveled in and nurtured my odd obsession with the suave secret agent. Our weekly Bond marathons became the crux of our relationship. Sometimes joined by my older sister, we escaped into our basement to blast the booming car chases and fight scenes far from my mother’s particularly sensitive ears.

But James Bond was just the gateway drug for my movie obsession. When my sister began to argue for something different and I developed the infuriating habit of quoting Bond’s witty one-liners as he said them, my dad introduced us to other cinema classics. He began with The Goonies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Fifth Element. Once our childish attention spans grew a little less erratic, he showed us more mature films like John Wayne’s The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rear Window. I was enraptured by them all.

Living Vicariously Through Movies

As a kid, I loved movies for their colorful depictions of the magical, the impossible, and the improbable. They provided thrilling visual fodder for my overactive imagination. I became a warrior like Mulan, a treasure-hunting adventurer like Indiana Jones, and of course, a resourceful secret agent that my father nicknamed ‘Jamie Bonina.’

I think my love of film, similar to my love of books, was born out of my desire to escape. I was not escaping a difficult or uncomfortable life. Other than the occasional pangs of homesickness for Chile, and the usual emotional growing pains of childhood such as sibling rivalry, I was a very happy kid. I didn’t want to escape my reality: I just wished to escape the mundane restrictions of being a kid.

The dreams of adventure that I’ve been able to pursue as an adult were already intensely present, but of course, mostly frustrated in my childhood. Too young to blaze my own trail, movies satisfied my need to perceive the magic and excitement that I knew existed, but that I had never seen, or perhaps hadn’t yet learned to identify in my daily life. This was the essence of my fascination with film until one movie pushed my cinephilia to a whole new level.

Obsession Becomes Vocation

It was 2009, and my dad took my sister and I to see James Cameron’s Avatar in 3-D. I felt so immersed in Pandora’s alien paradise, that my eyes filled with tears that fogged up my 3-D glasses. The vivid, almost touchable detail made me feel like I had stepped into the fantasy dreamscape. I could almost reach out and touch the ethereal, luminescent plants of Pandora’s nocturnal jungle. My stomach dropped with an exhilarating twinge of vertigo as I soared over the otherworldly landscape, riding on one of the pterodactyl-like creatures. That very day, I decided to study film.

I wanted to learn everything about the world, history, and mechanics behind these captivating, encapsulated dreams. After watching Avatar, it became my vocation to watch the classics and to cross titles off of my ever-growing list of must-sees. I was preparing for my time in university, when I would be able to certify my devotion with a degree. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to make of my love of film career-wise. I only knew that I wished to be part of the world that produced the engrossing films which had always gratified my most curious and adventurous inclinations.

Years later, I dove headfirst into my university film studies, determined to figure out the role that cinema would play in my future life. I never expected that as I began to study film as an art form, my cinephilia would deepen, expand, and then radically change form. I also didn’t expect for my passion to find its rival in my newfound fascination with the power of strategic communications.

For two years, I was torn between devoting myself to the arts of message development, and my lifelong adoration of cinema. It all came to a head when I got accepted into a study abroad film program in Scotland.

I was prepared for a marvelous semester of all film classes and the chance to travel abroad on my own for the first time. I was not prepared, however, for how that rip-roaring experience would radically shift my perspective not just on film, but also on the unexplored parts of my nature that made me fall in love with cinema in the first place…

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