My response to a survey in Framework (Volume 50, No. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009). I’ve retained only the first part — the question part — of Jonathan Buchsbaum and Elena Gorfinkel’s Introduction to the survey:
This dossier on cinephilia gathers responses to the following question:
“What is being fought for by today’s cinephilia(s)?
At the end of La Cinéphilie (2003), Antoine de Baecque wrote that classical cinephilia died in 1968, following the failure of cinema to film the political events of that year. Since that time, still according to de Baecque, the terrain of cinephilia changed radically as television and publicity/ advertising ‘invaded the domain of images.’ The proliferation of images has only accelerated with technological change ever since, hurtling through the internet and telecommunications.
Whatever the current status of cinephilia, certainly there are new cinephiles, even if they no longer hone their passion primarily in film theaters. But what is being fought for in this new generation of cinephilia? What causes animate cinephilia today and how are these new modes different from the ‘classical cinephilia’?
If, in particular, the Cahiers du Cinéma critics won their battles for auteurism, now part of most critics’ lingua franca, are there new critical paradigms of emergent polemics to complement, replace, or contest the earlier cinephilia? Has the institutionalization of film studies as a discipline depleted cinephilia of its social or aesthetic urgency?”
Reply to Cinephilia Survey
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Although I’ve only read a few portions of de Baecque’s La Cinéphilie, it seems clear that part of what he implicitly means by “classical cinephilia” is French cinephilia — which is quite different in many respects from the American brand, at least theoretically. As Raymond Bellour described it in 1997, French cinephilia was . . . from the beginning American. “How can one be a Hitchcocko-Hawksian?” It’s a question of theory, but even more of territory.
This is what necessarily divides me from Jonathan, in whom cinephilia was born, like in everybody else, through the nouvelle vague, but who, as an American, takes the nouvelle vague itself as an object of cinephilia — whereas the cinephile, in the historical and French sense, trains his sights on the American cinema as an enchanted and closed world, a referential system sufficient to interpret the rest.
This of course leaves out the legions of American cinephiles for whom cinephilia also begins and ends with American cinema — albeit quite a different American cinema in most cases from the one envisioned by Hitchcocko-Hawksians. So one has to begin by removing the parentheses from our question and asking, “What is being fought for by today’s cinephilias?” And one can start to answer this with “Many things. But, perhaps first of all, a remapping of film history and film aesthetics based on what commerce has chosen to make available by other means — and what various viewers, in the U.S., France, and elsewhere, have chosen to define as ‘available.’”
This latter can range all the way from what you can rent at Blockbuster or via Netflix to what you can buy from diverse outlets around the world, assuming you have a multiregional DVD player and assuming, in other cases, that you’re willing to navigate sites and/or watch DVDs in other languages. And within all these possibilities, one can choose to restrict one’s tastes to shlock horror or action genres, or rediscover Hollywood or art cinema or documentaries or experimental film or animation or pornography — the list is endless. And how one chooses to go about exploring and then consuming what one finds also throws out myriad possibilities. How does one hear about what one goes looking for? And, assuming one finds it, does one watch it alone or with friends, at a cineclub or a party, on a laptop or a large plasma screen, etc.?
Critical paradigms, of course, are also being remapped along with our canons. Auteurism today is not precisely the same thing that the Cahiers du cinémacritics of the ’50s were fighting for; some battles were won (Hitchcock and Hawks, for instance) while others (such as Tashlin and Jerry Lewis) were lost, and still others that should have been fought but weren’t (e.g., Jacques Tourneur, André de Toth) are being belatedly waged today. And the playing fields where these battles happen are no longer the same: blogs, chat groups, and online magazines are hardly the same things as print magazines or college film societies.
If anything, lists—which were already beginning to matter in the ’50s and ’60s (via Sarris’s The American Cinema, for example)—are even more important today because of the widening of many choices (as well as the narrowing of certain others, such as the choices made today by Turner Classic Movies and the various studio divisions who release box sets devoted to Old Hollywood versus the wealth of what used to be shown on network TV, albeit with commercial interruptions and other nuisances that may or may not be operative now).
For me, academic film studies have soured much of cinephilia because of its anti-art biases. What drove me out of an academic career in English and American literature in the ’60s was largely the grim realization that I was starting to read college outlines of assigned texts so that the texts themselves wouldn’t be ruined for me when I went to them for my own reasons. And what finally drove me out of academic film studies and back into journalism in the late ’80s was no less grim: the realization that I couldn’t expect to parlay my knowledge or love of film into a livelihood that would have been granted to me, in any case, by film teachers who got along just fine without much of either.