Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) offers the best definition: a cinephilic pilgrimage resembles Madeleine's purported visits to Golden Gate Park's ‘Portals of the Past’ monument, a remnant of Old San Francisco that serves as the site of her psychic transformation to – and/or possession by – the film's avatar of Alta California, Carlotta Valdes. During these visits, Madeleine allegedly connects with a colonial-era narrative by staring across Lake Lloyd at the monument ‘on the far side’.

Similarly, in their pilgrimages, cinephiles attempt to reify (that is, ground within the real) an inherently ephemeral experience of the past while, at the same time, utilizing real spaces as ‘portals’ through which to once again access, personally experience, and even occupy, that past. However, just as Scottie learns that Judy can never match the Madeleine of his memory, cinephilic pilgrims soon discover that the real cannot live up to the image. The ‘Spiral of Time’ (mentioned by Chris Marker in Sans Soleil (1983), urban erasure, lack of affective context and lack of framing all contribute to the inadequacy of the real in the face of expectations derived from cinematic memory. In order to occupy and control the space of possibility and meaning (a phenomenon Siegfried Kracauer refers to as ‘psychophysical correspondence’), the cinephilic pilgrim must exercise creative agency; only then can the cinephile redeem both the real and the image.

The example of Gone with the Wind illustrates the interrelationship between these two kinds of spectacle and their associations with particular ideas of femininity and masculinity. This gendering of spectacle is related to ‘the historical gaze’, a performative gesture that exemplifies the wider rhetoric of historical films, in their seeking to address the historical knowledge of the film spectator and to uphold a vision of history as being driven by powerful men, aware of their own destiny. Over the course of the three famous hilltop scenes in Gone with the Wind, one can plot Scarlett O'Hara's increased access to this kind of foresight and fortitude coded as ‘masculine’. This character arc can also be traced through Scarlett's shifting place within the film's use of spectacle: she begins the film wholly preoccupied with the domestic world of lavish parties and beautiful gowns; however, after her encounter with cataclysmic history visualized as a vast, terrible spectacle (the fall of Atlanta), Scarlett assumes the role occupied by her broken and emasculated father.