Abstract
Our final chapter revisits the concept of cinephilia after digital media and distributed networks.1 We seek to identify a place for critical cinephilia that moves toward an opening of meaning from the control of transnational media corporations (TMCs). Romanticized and institutionalized as an expression for an “excessive love of cinema” that emerged in postwar France for a generation of privileged (mostly male, invariably white) audiences, cinephilia has come to be associated with nostalgia for the pleasures of flickering celluloid in a darkened cinematheque.2 We resituate mid-twentieth-century notions of cinephilia within early twenty-first-century frameworks that recognize that universalizing North Atlantic assumptions about cinema are less capable of recognizing the complexities of global articulations of cinephilia today. Film studies scholarship has appropriated the term “cinephilia” for cultural and historical contexts comparable to postwar France, including South Asian diasporic attachment to homeland through consumption of Bollywood films and the “cine-mania” surrounding contemporary South Korean films. With the consolidation of TMCs, cinephilia reproduces itself as technophilia, a consumerist obsession with the technologies and the safe harborof the home theater against an onslaught of potential threats within public spaces.3
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Notes
See, for example, Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944–1968 (Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard, 2003).
Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2006): 50.
Dudley Andrew, “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,” PMLA 115.3 (May 2000): 341–351,
as cited in Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006): 5.
Colin McCabe, The Eloquence of the Vulgar (London: British Film Institute, 1999): 152.
See, for example, Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968).
Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden: Blackwell Press, 2000): 88.
Glauber Rocha, “Cinema of Hunger,” trans. Burnes Hollyman and Randal Johnson; Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences from the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” trans. Julianne Burton and Michael Chanan; and Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, 25 Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael Chanan (London: British Film Institute, 1983): 13–33.
For responses to these manifestos, see Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn, eds., Screening World Cinema: A Screen Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), particularly Julianne Burton-Carvajal’s “Marginal Cinemas and Mainstream Critical Theory” and Teshome H. Gabriel’s “Colonialism and ‘Law and Order’ Criticism” (17–47). 9.
Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974–1975): 39–47;
Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metaphysical Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrew and Bernard Augst, Camera Obscura 1 (Fall 1976): 104–126;
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2–12.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18;
Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Theory,” Cultural Critique 4 (fall 1985): 59–79, revised in Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 12–27;
Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Screen 29.4 (autumn 1988): 66–76;
bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992): 115–131.
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participation Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992);
Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36.4 (Winter 1995): 371–393;
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002);
and Kate Egan, “The Celebration of a ‘Proper Product’: Exploring the Residual Collectible through the “‘Video Nasty,’” in Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 200–221.
Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays on Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 231,
as cited in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, “Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures,” in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 14.
Christian Metz, “Photography as Fetish” (1984), October 34 (1985): 81–90.
See, for example, Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times Magazine (25 February 1996), Stanley Kauffmann, “A Lost Love,” New Republic (08 and 15 September 1997), and David Denby, “The Moviegoers: Why Don’t People Like the Right Movies Anymore?” New Yorker (06 April 1998). More recently, see André Gaudrealt and Philippe Marion, La fin du cinéma: Un media en crise à l’ère du numérique (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013).
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Jonathan Romney, “Back to the Future: A Cinephile”s Response,” Sight & Sound 17.11 (November 2007): 24.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–251. Under neoliberalism, capitalism also won as is evident in looking back to Perry Barlow”s “Declaration of Independence,” which argued that cyberspace would eschew the laws of industrial capitalism.
Thomas Elsasser, “Cinephilia, or the Uses of Disenchantment,” in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 38.
Robert E. Davis, “The Instantaneous Worldwide Release: Coming Soon to Everyone Everywhere,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London and New York: Routledge, 2006): 77.
Cinephilia’s desire for singularity, originality, and rarity would seem entangled with the modernist myths that Rosalind Krauss describes in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, “Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures,” in Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 16–17.
For an analysis of the transnational cinephilia of Hindi films among Palestinians and Israelis, see Monika Mehta, “Reading Cinephilia in Kikar ha-Halomot/Desperado Square: Viewing the Local and Transnational in Sangam/Confluence,” South Asian Popular Culture 4.2 (October 2006): 147–162.
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Dan Streible, “The Role of Orphan Films in the 21st Century Archive,” Cinema Journal 46.3 (Spring 2007): 124–128.
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and Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995): 53–75.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 68; “Interview with Hayden White,” in Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism, ed. Eve Domanska (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1998): 34.
See David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1998): 95.
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“Lossy” formats that translate celluloid images into digital code for storage on DVD and playback on computers and DVD players, such as JPEG and MPEG formats, involve compression by a deletion of some of the information, so that the infinite reproduction of the object without loss is possible theoretically but not actually. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001): 54.
See David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (New York and London: Basic Books, 2008). This book can be downloaded at http://www.viralspiral.cc/download-book.
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Cf. Robert Willim, “Rendering Culture: Elsewhereness, The Ethnographic, The Surreal,” unpublished conference paper (2012), https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/2856201.
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Néstor García Canclini, Consumers as Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 5.
Deepa Kumar, “Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management during the 2003 Iraq War,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3.1 (March 2006): 54–55.
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Sama Alshaibi, “Memory Work of the Palestinian Diaspora,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 27.2 (2006): 31.
Anna Siomopoulos and Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Silent Film Exhibition and Performative Historiography,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6.2 (Fall 2006): 109–111.
David Robinson, From Peepshow to Palace: The Birth of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 171.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
In “Race, Reception, and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6.2 (fall 2006), Anna Siomopoulos writes: “As film historian Mary Carbine has shown, the music of these performers did not punctuate action, heighten emotion, or support character development; in fact, the music accompanying white films often ignored the story altogether, to the horror of some black film critics who wanted black spectatorship to resemble white spectatorship in white theaters. One such critic bemoaned a performance of the song ‘Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie’ that brought down the house in the middle of a death scene” (114). She cites Mary Carbine, “‘The Finest outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996): 234–262.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Revisiting and Remixing Black Cinema,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6.2 (Fall 2006): 119.
John Hochheimer, “Media Antecedents to Within Our Gates: Weaving Disparate Threads,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6.2 (Fall 2006): 125.
For a transcript and analysis of the spoken-word text, see Grace An, “Spoken Word in Within Our Gates: Revisited and Remixed,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 6.2 (Fall 2006): 128–132.
Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993): 79.
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Chris Berry, ed., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
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See Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participation Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992)
and Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002).
Emma Davie, “Staying with the Trouble: The Radical Work of CAMP,” DOX European Documentary Magazine 103 (September 2014): 18–20.
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Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2004): 16.
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© 2015 Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
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Hudson, D., Zimmermann, P.R. (2015). Collaborative Remix Zones: Toward a Critical Cinephilia. In: Thinking Through Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_6
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