About

Cinephile or Cinephile Candle is an image macro featuring a candle, a red rose and the text "Cineplhie" written in cursive. The meme became a popular reaction image on X, former Twitter, in December 2021, being often used by people bragging about their movie taste or cinephile enthusiasm.

Origin

The image used in the cinephile candle meme is originally a Russian reaction image with the "Скорбим" text above the candle and red rose, which is translated as "mourning" or "grieving." The earliest online mention of the image was uploaded by Antoaneta Nikolova Gotseva^[1] on February 17th, 2014, on a Russian blog website about the death of a teacher from the Nevsky district of St. Petersburg. (seen below)

The earliest known usage of the cinephile candle meme was posted on December 29th, 2021, by X user @naurveen. In the post (seen below) he wrote "Me, after watching an Oscar nominated film on bootleg website that tried to open p* in another tab." The original tweet has since been deleted but Reddit^[2] user @Aromatic-Guava8203 uploaded a screenshot of the tweet on January 26th, 2022, amassing more than 1,000 upvotes and 7 comments in two years.

Spread

The cinephile candle meme grew as a popular reaction image over the next years on X and Facebook among film enthusiasts tweeting about their preferences or critics about recently released movies. For instance, on September 1st, 2022, X^[3] user @localmaninarea posted an edited version of the Russian meme, replacing the "Скорбим" text with "cinephile" written in cursive, adding the caption "thinking about stuff like Kubrick and Spielberg." The tweet (seen below) received roughly 37 likes and five comments in two years.

. For example, on August 19th, 2024, Letterboxd's official Facebook^[4] account shared a screenshot of a tweet in which a user posted a version of the meme with the text "indecisive cinephile" (seen below), amassing more than 4,100 likes and 1,000 shares in three months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References