Re-Viewing Cinephilia: The Movement and the Moment
Rashna Wadia Richards
Perhaps it is not cinema which has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the distinctive kind of love that cinema inspired.
—Susan Sontag, “A Century of Cinema”
If we toss away an older theory like an old dress or a used car, we lose an important part of a long conversation.
—James Naremore, “The Future of Academic Film Study”
I. A History of Cinephilia: The Story So Far
The decision to compose the Divine Comedy in Italian, Colin MacCabe has argued, was quite radical. Refusing to use Latin, Dante opted to write in a vulgar rather than sacred tongue, in the vernacular rather than the language of empire. He hoped to appeal to a new audience, comprised of fellow citizens who formed the “volgari e non litterati.” While Dante may have been incapable of conceiving a truly democratic audience, his discursive move envisioned a new culture that was willing to disregard the traditional socio-cultural authority of church and priests. The new and democratic visual art forms of the twentieth century, MacCabe suggests, offer a similar opportunity to reimagine our notions of language and culture. During the two decades following the end of the Second World War until the political shift ushered in by the events of May 1968, film scholars, particularly a group of young critics associated with the Cahiers du Cinéma in France, adopted a new mode of writing about cinema. Rather than praising the “tradition of quality,” they obsessed over idiosyncratic details from popular American cinema.[1] Their writing attempted to recapture the extreme visual pleasure of specific cinematic moments, like the last of the bowling pins falling in Howard Hawks’s Scarface or a group of umbrellas parting as a man escapes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.[2] Like Dante, they embraced the “vulgar,” positing that even the commercialized products of Hollywood were worthy of consideration and could be used to rethink the relation between high art and mass culture. Inspired by an eccentric love of cinema, this new discourse came to be known as cinephilia.
That distinctive love, Susan Sontag lamented at the centennial marking the invention of cinema, has now ended. Tracing the “life cycle” of cinema’s first hundred years, she argued that the medium once regarded as “quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time” (118) has now become a decadent art. But it is not just cinema that Sontag proclaimed dead. “Cinephilia itself,” she noted, “has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish” (122). In academic film studies,
cinephilia has been unpopular for a while. The post-’68 investment in ideological critique discredited cinephiliac discourse as capricious and irrelevant. As Christian Metz famously declared in his groundbreaking study of cinema and psychoanalysis, “To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema” (15).[3] Even after the turn from theory to historiography in the 1980s, cinephilia failed to make a comeback. And now, in the age of hyperindustrial cinema, Sontag claimed, cine-love itself has not survived. Rather than serving as the final word on this passionate mode of spectatorship, however, Sontag’s elegy sparked a resurgence of international interest in cinephilia.[4] The last decade has seen numerous reassessments of cinephilia and its role in film studies. Indeed, if the period between 1945 and the late 1960s was the moment of cinephilia, then the last decade has witnessed a resurrection. Cinephilia may be dead, but its ghost lingers in contemporary writing about cinema.
One might say that cinephilia is experiencing a kind of second moment in film studies, and responses to its resurgence have emerged from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives. In France particularly, the conversation has revolved around the original moment of cinephilia—what Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener have recently called the phase of classical cinephilia. Cahiers du Cinéma and Vertigo have devoted significant issues to historical cinephiliac practices, its origins in and effects on French film culture. Antoine de Baecque’s study of the history and theory of cinephilia also covers the classical phase up to the late 1960s. De Bacque historicizes cinephilia, defining it as “a way of watching films, speaking about them and then diffusing that discourse” (qtd. in Elsaesser 28). For de Baecque, then, cinephilia is seen as a specific cultural phenomenon that grew out of, and therefore must be contextualized in, postwar France’s ciné culture. The most recent and comprehensive history of cinephilia comes from Christian Keathley, who traces its evolution in relation to the general conditions of modernity.[5]
While one camp of film scholars has focused on cinephilia as a historical object of study, another has turned its attention to the transformation of cinephilia in contemporary film culture. For although the conversation about the reemergence of cinephilia a decade ago may have begun wistfully—considering what it was and mourning its alleged demise—more recent debates have shifted the focus to what it might yet become. In 1999, the Australian-based online journal Senses of Cinema issued an exciting collection of essays entitled “Permanent Ghosts: Cinephilia in the Age of the Internet and Video.” This series refutes the notion of the death of cinephilia by examining it in relation to new technologies. Confronting an earlier generation’s melancholic nostalgia, this collection of essays, written mostly by film scholars born after the end of classical cinephilia, examines the transformation of international film and film culture in the era of video and the internet. The debate for younger scholars is not whether cinephilia is still viable; their assumption is that cinephilia is not dead. Their primary concern, however, is with new forms of ciné-love in the age of new media.
The most influential recent work on contemporary cinephilia is Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin’s edited anthology, Movie Mutations, which consists of five years of correspondence between film scholars and filmmakers from around the globe, reflecting on “the changing face of world cinephilia.” Rosenbaum and Martin are primarily interested in delineating a transnational approach to contemporary cinephilia, calling for the formation of global communities of cinephiles, whose collaborations are facilitated by new media technologies as well as international film festivals. In fact, web-based communities and film festivals provide the second generation of cinephiles with sites for rediscovering cinematic pleasures in independents, the avant-garde, and films from developing national cinemas. Rosenbaum and Martin’s anthology has been enormously significant, inviting alternative readings of contemporary cinephilia in a transnational movie world. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener take up that call; in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, they present a series of essays rethinking present-day cinephilia “as an umbrella term for a number of different affective engagements with the moving image” (14). Like Rosenbaum and Martin, they operate on the premise that cinephilia is thriving. Yet, compared to their classical predecessors, the new generation of cinephiles is quite differently networked. The essays in de Valck and Hagener’s collection reflect these differences, tracing the global significance of contemporary film culture as well as exploring the changes in marketing, distribution, and filmmaking that have emerged in response to the second wave of cinephilia. The most noteworthy in the volume is Thomas Elsaesser’s contribution on the detours and deferrals of what he calls cinephilia, take two. “The new cinephilia,” he argues in the book’s opening essay, “is turning the unlimited archive of our media memory, including the unloved bits and pieces, the long forgotten films or programs into potentially desirable and much valued clips, extras and bonuses” (41). In other words, the new cinephile has become a collector and a trader, a lover and a savvy consumer. The new cinephilia has embraced new technologies, with all the benefits of file swapping, sampling, and even bootlegging, to further democratize the pleasures of cinema.
II. A Cinephiliac History: The Road Ahead
In the previous section, I have traced the reception of cinephilia in film studies over the last decade. These recent reconsiderations have historicized classical cinephilia and theorized its transformation in today’s globalized film culture. However, these studies appear to suggest that cinephilia now functions entirely outside the cultural authority of academia. So, what might a revival of cinephilia signify for the practice of academic film studies? Can moments of intense visual pleasure be activated as prompts for cinematic research? If we follow James Naremore’s contention in the epigraph above, what does cinephilia’s reintroduction add to the “long conversation” (126)? In a dialogue about rethinking cinephilia for film studies with Australian scholar Noel King, Paul Willemen suggests that the practice of fetishizing a peculiar moment, isolating an eccentric detail, signals more than just an uncritical buffism. Cinephilia, he argues, marks the limits of traditional modes of historiography by “designat[ing] something which resists, which escapes existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks” (231). Drawing on Willemen’s contention in my current book project, “Lightning Flashes: A Cinephiliac History of Classic Hollywood,” I argue that cinephiliac moments hold the potential to prompt unanticipated discussions between film history, theory, and visual culture. Cinephiliac moments are like Walter Benjamin’s “lightning flashes”: they pulsate briefly, sometimes in the margins of our attention, exceeding their narrative contexts and offering unconventional points of entry into the cinematic and cultural terrain of Classic Hollywood. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin offered a way of thinking about isolated moments from the past that could not be linearized by traditional historicism. For that purpose, he introduced the notion of historical materialism, a form of writing capable of “blast[ing] open the continuum of history” and excavating an alternative understanding of the past from the “flashes” that cannot be contained in any pre-existing discourse (262). For a historical materialist, Benjamin has noted elsewhere, knowledge comes “only in lightning flashes” (Arcades 456). By activating the excessive signification concealed in the cinephiliac flashes from even standard studio films, I demonstrate a research method that can help us think about cinematic problems not accounted for by film-theory-as-usual.
This project does not offer a history of cinephilia. Instead, it treats cinephiliac moments as clues toward an alternative historiography, one modeled on Benjamin’s figures of historical materialism: the ragpicker, the flâneur, the detective, and the storyteller. Thus, each chapter issues from a Benjaminian “character,” deployed both thematically and methodologically as a way into Classic Hollywood. I begin, for example, with a mysterious fur coat falling on Jean Arthur’s head in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living. Like Benjamin’s ragpicker, who “assemble[s] large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components” (Arcades 461), I pick at outmoded sartorial articles and uncover unforeseen parallels between the studio system, Surrealism, and the fashion industry. The next chapter imagines a flâneur’s gaze at the enigmatic objects of film noir. On a walking tour of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, I pause to look at a hand-rolled cigarette, a buzzing telephone, random wall-hangings of horses. Just as the flâneur finds “ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name” (Arcades 417), flânerie enables me to consider the stuff that movies are made of in order to address the relationship between the film still and the narrative. Then, I examine the rather conventional “signature” moment in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, where a former Nazi mastermind reveals his identity by sketching a swastika on a notepad in a phone booth. Here, using the Benjaminian detective who is keenly interested in the surfaces of things, I investigate the strange case of the missing auteur. Finally, I turn to the arresting montage of photographic stills, appearing like that “slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers” so valued in storytelling (“The Storyteller” 93), in George Cukor’s 1954 remake of A Star is Born. Like the storyteller, I narrate how, at a time when its gradual collapse is already underway, Hollywood tells and retells tales about itself. Overall, the project proceeds by connecting seemingly unrelated images and ideas. In this cinephiliac history, Classic Hollywood appears not as a consistent system with a uniform style but as an uncanny network of echoes and coincidences.
Notes
[1] François Truffaut attacked the “tradition of quality” in “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” arguing that the tendency of “faithful” adaptation of literary masterpieces had in fact rendered French cinema sterile. Indeed, as MacCabe notes, Cahiers itself was founded “because of the impossibility of working with the cultural institutions of either the state or its opposition” (152).
[2] It should be noted that this practice of Parisian cinephiles from the 1950s and 60s can be traced back to an earlier generation of film lovers, especially to the influence of photogénie. In the 1920s, the Surrealists proposed the notion of photogénie as a way of theorizing the spectator’s relation to the screen as well as his/her experience of fleeting cinematic moments.
[3] Metz’s full contention was that a theoretician may still love the cinema, but he/she ought to approach it “as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it” (15).
[4] In 1996, Sontag wrote a similar piece for The New York Times Magazine called “The Decay of Cinema,” which stimulated a lot of American film critics to reflect on the status of cinema itself as well as the function of cinephilia.
[5] Keathley’s book is especially provocative because he transforms the experience of cinephilia into an experiment in film criticism.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
—. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253-64.
—. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83-109.
De Valck, Marijke and Malte Hagener. “Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And
Other Videosyncractic Pleasures.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory. Eds. de Valck and
Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 11-24.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love and
Memory. Eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 27-
43.
Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2005.
MacCabe, Colin. The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema, and the Politics of Culture.
London: BFI, 1999.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton
et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Naremore, James and Adrian Martin. “The Future of Academic Film Study.” Movie Mutations:
The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. Eds. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin.
London: BFI, 2003. 119-32.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan and Adrian Martin, eds. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World
Cinephilia. London: BFI, 2003.
Sontag, Susan. “A Century of Cinema.” 1995. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001.
—. “The Decay of Cinema.” The New York Times Magazine 25 February 1996: 60-61.
Truffaut, François. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” 1954. Movies and Methods:
Volume I. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. 224-37.
Willemen, Paul. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1994.
Rashna Wadia Richards: Re-Viewing Cinephilia
Re-Viewing Cinephilia: The Movement and the Moment
Rashna Wadia Richards
Perhaps it is not cinema which has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the distinctive kind of love that cinema inspired.
—Susan Sontag, “A Century of Cinema”
If we toss away an older theory like an old dress or a used car, we lose an important part of a long conversation.
—James Naremore, “The Future of Academic Film Study”
I. A History of Cinephilia: The Story So Far
The decision to compose the Divine Comedy in Italian, Colin MacCabe has argued, was quite radical. Refusing to use Latin, Dante opted to write in a vulgar rather than sacred tongue, in the vernacular rather than the language of empire. He hoped to appeal to a new audience, comprised of fellow citizens who formed the “volgari e non litterati.” While Dante may have been incapable of conceiving a truly democratic audience, his discursive move envisioned a new culture that was willing to disregard the traditional socio-cultural authority of church and priests. The new and democratic visual art forms of the twentieth century, MacCabe suggests, offer a similar opportunity to reimagine our notions of language and culture. During the two decades following the end of the Second World War until the political shift ushered in by the events of May 1968, film scholars, particularly a group of young critics associated with the Cahiers du Cinéma in France, adopted a new mode of writing about cinema. Rather than praising the “tradition of quality,” they obsessed over idiosyncratic details from popular American cinema.[1] Their writing attempted to recapture the extreme visual pleasure of specific cinematic moments, like the last of the bowling pins falling in Howard Hawks’s Scarface or a group of umbrellas parting as a man escapes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.[2] Like Dante, they embraced the “vulgar,” positing that even the commercialized products of Hollywood were worthy of consideration and could be used to rethink the relation between high art and mass culture. Inspired by an eccentric love of cinema, this new discourse came to be known as cinephilia.
That distinctive love, Susan Sontag lamented at the centennial marking the invention of cinema, has now ended. Tracing the “life cycle” of cinema’s first hundred years, she argued that the medium once regarded as “quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time” (118) has now become a decadent art. But it is not just cinema that Sontag proclaimed dead. “Cinephilia itself,” she noted, “has come under attack, as something quaint, outmoded, snobbish” (122). In academic film studies,
cinephilia has been unpopular for a while. The post-’68 investment in ideological critique discredited cinephiliac discourse as capricious and irrelevant. As Christian Metz famously declared in his groundbreaking study of cinema and psychoanalysis, “To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema” (15).[3] Even after the turn from theory to historiography in the 1980s, cinephilia failed to make a comeback. And now, in the age of hyperindustrial cinema, Sontag claimed, cine-love itself has not survived. Rather than serving as the final word on this passionate mode of spectatorship, however, Sontag’s elegy sparked a resurgence of international interest in cinephilia.[4] The last decade has seen numerous reassessments of cinephilia and its role in film studies. Indeed, if the period between 1945 and the late 1960s was the moment of cinephilia, then the last decade has witnessed a resurrection. Cinephilia may be dead, but its ghost lingers in contemporary writing about cinema.
One might say that cinephilia is experiencing a kind of second moment in film studies, and responses to its resurgence have emerged from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives. In France particularly, the conversation has revolved around the original moment of cinephilia—what Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener have recently called the phase of classical cinephilia. Cahiers du Cinéma and Vertigo have devoted significant issues to historical cinephiliac practices, its origins in and effects on French film culture. Antoine de Baecque’s study of the history and theory of cinephilia also covers the classical phase up to the late 1960s. De Bacque historicizes cinephilia, defining it as “a way of watching films, speaking about them and then diffusing that discourse” (qtd. in Elsaesser 28). For de Baecque, then, cinephilia is seen as a specific cultural phenomenon that grew out of, and therefore must be contextualized in, postwar France’s ciné culture. The most recent and comprehensive history of cinephilia comes from Christian Keathley, who traces its evolution in relation to the general conditions of modernity.[5]
While one camp of film scholars has focused on cinephilia as a historical object of study, another has turned its attention to the transformation of cinephilia in contemporary film culture. For although the conversation about the reemergence of cinephilia a decade ago may have begun wistfully—considering what it was and mourning its alleged demise—more recent debates have shifted the focus to what it might yet become. In 1999, the Australian-based online journal Senses of Cinema issued an exciting collection of essays entitled “Permanent Ghosts: Cinephilia in the Age of the Internet and Video.” This series refutes the notion of the death of cinephilia by examining it in relation to new technologies. Confronting an earlier generation’s melancholic nostalgia, this collection of essays, written mostly by film scholars born after the end of classical cinephilia, examines the transformation of international film and film culture in the era of video and the internet. The debate for younger scholars is not whether cinephilia is still viable; their assumption is that cinephilia is not dead. Their primary concern, however, is with new forms of ciné-love in the age of new media.
The most influential recent work on contemporary cinephilia is Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin’s edited anthology, Movie Mutations, which consists of five years of correspondence between film scholars and filmmakers from around the globe, reflecting on “the changing face of world cinephilia.” Rosenbaum and Martin are primarily interested in delineating a transnational approach to contemporary cinephilia, calling for the formation of global communities of cinephiles, whose collaborations are facilitated by new media technologies as well as international film festivals. In fact, web-based communities and film festivals provide the second generation of cinephiles with sites for rediscovering cinematic pleasures in independents, the avant-garde, and films from developing national cinemas. Rosenbaum and Martin’s anthology has been enormously significant, inviting alternative readings of contemporary cinephilia in a transnational movie world. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener take up that call; in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, they present a series of essays rethinking present-day cinephilia “as an umbrella term for a number of different affective engagements with the moving image” (14). Like Rosenbaum and Martin, they operate on the premise that cinephilia is thriving. Yet, compared to their classical predecessors, the new generation of cinephiles is quite differently networked. The essays in de Valck and Hagener’s collection reflect these differences, tracing the global significance of contemporary film culture as well as exploring the changes in marketing, distribution, and filmmaking that have emerged in response to the second wave of cinephilia. The most noteworthy in the volume is Thomas Elsaesser’s contribution on the detours and deferrals of what he calls cinephilia, take two. “The new cinephilia,” he argues in the book’s opening essay, “is turning the unlimited archive of our media memory, including the unloved bits and pieces, the long forgotten films or programs into potentially desirable and much valued clips, extras and bonuses” (41). In other words, the new cinephile has become a collector and a trader, a lover and a savvy consumer. The new cinephilia has embraced new technologies, with all the benefits of file swapping, sampling, and even bootlegging, to further democratize the pleasures of cinema.
II. A Cinephiliac History: The Road Ahead
In the previous section, I have traced the reception of cinephilia in film studies over the last decade. These recent reconsiderations have historicized classical cinephilia and theorized its transformation in today’s globalized film culture. However, these studies appear to suggest that cinephilia now functions entirely outside the cultural authority of academia. So, what might a revival of cinephilia signify for the practice of academic film studies? Can moments of intense visual pleasure be activated as prompts for cinematic research? If we follow James Naremore’s contention in the epigraph above, what does cinephilia’s reintroduction add to the “long conversation” (126)? In a dialogue about rethinking cinephilia for film studies with Australian scholar Noel King, Paul Willemen suggests that the practice of fetishizing a peculiar moment, isolating an eccentric detail, signals more than just an uncritical buffism. Cinephilia, he argues, marks the limits of traditional modes of historiography by “designat[ing] something which resists, which escapes existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks” (231). Drawing on Willemen’s contention in my current book project, “Lightning Flashes: A Cinephiliac History of Classic Hollywood,” I argue that cinephiliac moments hold the potential to prompt unanticipated discussions between film history, theory, and visual culture. Cinephiliac moments are like Walter Benjamin’s “lightning flashes”: they pulsate briefly, sometimes in the margins of our attention, exceeding their narrative contexts and offering unconventional points of entry into the cinematic and cultural terrain of Classic Hollywood. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin offered a way of thinking about isolated moments from the past that could not be linearized by traditional historicism. For that purpose, he introduced the notion of historical materialism, a form of writing capable of “blast[ing] open the continuum of history” and excavating an alternative understanding of the past from the “flashes” that cannot be contained in any pre-existing discourse (262). For a historical materialist, Benjamin has noted elsewhere, knowledge comes “only in lightning flashes” (Arcades 456). By activating the excessive signification concealed in the cinephiliac flashes from even standard studio films, I demonstrate a research method that can help us think about cinematic problems not accounted for by film-theory-as-usual.
This project does not offer a history of cinephilia. Instead, it treats cinephiliac moments as clues toward an alternative historiography, one modeled on Benjamin’s figures of historical materialism: the ragpicker, the flâneur, the detective, and the storyteller. Thus, each chapter issues from a Benjaminian “character,” deployed both thematically and methodologically as a way into Classic Hollywood. I begin, for example, with a mysterious fur coat falling on Jean Arthur’s head in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living. Like Benjamin’s ragpicker, who “assemble[s] large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components” (Arcades 461), I pick at outmoded sartorial articles and uncover unforeseen parallels between the studio system, Surrealism, and the fashion industry. The next chapter imagines a flâneur’s gaze at the enigmatic objects of film noir. On a walking tour of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, I pause to look at a hand-rolled cigarette, a buzzing telephone, random wall-hangings of horses. Just as the flâneur finds “ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name” (Arcades 417), flânerie enables me to consider the stuff that movies are made of in order to address the relationship between the film still and the narrative. Then, I examine the rather conventional “signature” moment in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, where a former Nazi mastermind reveals his identity by sketching a swastika on a notepad in a phone booth. Here, using the Benjaminian detective who is keenly interested in the surfaces of things, I investigate the strange case of the missing auteur. Finally, I turn to the arresting montage of photographic stills, appearing like that “slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers” so valued in storytelling (“The Storyteller” 93), in George Cukor’s 1954 remake of A Star is Born. Like the storyteller, I narrate how, at a time when its gradual collapse is already underway, Hollywood tells and retells tales about itself. Overall, the project proceeds by connecting seemingly unrelated images and ideas. In this cinephiliac history, Classic Hollywood appears not as a consistent system with a uniform style but as an uncanny network of echoes and coincidences.
Notes
[1] François Truffaut attacked the “tradition of quality” in “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” arguing that the tendency of “faithful” adaptation of literary masterpieces had in fact rendered French cinema sterile. Indeed, as MacCabe notes, Cahiers itself was founded “because of the impossibility of working with the cultural institutions of either the state or its opposition” (152).
[2] It should be noted that this practice of Parisian cinephiles from the 1950s and 60s can be traced back to an earlier generation of film lovers, especially to the influence of photogénie. In the 1920s, the Surrealists proposed the notion of photogénie as a way of theorizing the spectator’s relation to the screen as well as his/her experience of fleeting cinematic moments.
[3] Metz’s full contention was that a theoretician may still love the cinema, but he/she ought to approach it “as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it” (15).
[4] In 1996, Sontag wrote a similar piece for The New York Times Magazine called “The Decay of Cinema,” which stimulated a lot of American film critics to reflect on the status of cinema itself as well as the function of cinephilia.
[5] Keathley’s book is especially provocative because he transforms the experience of cinephilia into an experiment in film criticism.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
—. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253-64.
—. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83-109.
De Valck, Marijke and Malte Hagener. “Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And
Other Videosyncractic Pleasures.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory. Eds. de Valck and
Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 11-24.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love and
Memory. Eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005. 27-
43.
Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
2005.
MacCabe, Colin. The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema, and the Politics of Culture.
London: BFI, 1999.
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton
et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Naremore, James and Adrian Martin. “The Future of Academic Film Study.” Movie Mutations:
The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. Eds. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin.
London: BFI, 2003. 119-32.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan and Adrian Martin, eds. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World
Cinephilia. London: BFI, 2003.
Sontag, Susan. “A Century of Cinema.” 1995. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001.
—. “The Decay of Cinema.” The New York Times Magazine 25 February 1996: 60-61.
Truffaut, François. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” 1954. Movies and Methods:
Volume I. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. 224-37.
Willemen, Paul. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1994.