This week, as I write, I am about to teach my final cinema classes. Perhaps not final forever, but final for now – and the last in a stable, university job. At the young age of 55, I am going back to freelance writing about film and related audiovisual adventures.

Serge Daney once defined cinephilia as “an eternal return to a fundamental pleasure”. This pleasure's constitution is somewhat different for each culture, each generation and, finally, each individual. But whatever it is that forms the core of the cinephile passion for any of us, it is to that, apparently, we shall return.

Often, when I read synoptic accounts about the work of the best essayists and critics – such as Raymond Durgnat or Siegfried Kracauer – I sense the strange, almost wicked glee of their admiring exegetes in noting that, especially as critics’ lives approach their end, their explorations usually came full circle: right back to the founding moment of their pleasure. They return to the primal obsessions, to the spark that got them into the game in the first place – while cinema history strides on, obliviously, ahead.

It is poetic, it is sentimental, but it is also a bit sad: as if the cinephile is doomed to travel backwards. In the last years of his life (so I have been told), Durgnat had no inkling that directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Béla Tarr had achieved cultural visibility; he was happy enough with his beloved VHS tapes of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger and other filmmakers whom he had begun studying decades previously.