Beyond Cinephilia

Abstract

Film festival discourses position festival audiences in homogenized ‘local’ contexts where ‘local’ is geographically and conceptually located within national boundaries distinct from the global flows of cultural traffic that festivals facilitate. Particularities of audience constituencies, such as the relationship with cinema and the historical and cultural contexts in which cinema and festivals are experienced, are overlooked. Other approaches position audiences within the rubrics of the ‘cinephile’, a descriptor of audience behaviours that insufficiently references the consumption contexts and processes of meaning production that occur at each consumption site. Using personal observations from an encounter between documentary film and nascent audience constituencies at the Ladakh International Film Festival, India, the author suggests that desire for the cinematic object emerges from social and historical contexts exceeding cinephilia. A phenomenological approach affords a meaningful framework for locating its significance. Finally, the consumption of documentary film transpires as a unique instance of restoring equity within this cultural-historical cinema context.