Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia Edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin

Abstract

MOVIE MUTATIONS: THE CHANCING FACE OF WORLD CINEPHILIA Edited Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin London: British Film Institute, 2003 (distributed in North America University of California Press), 224 pp. Academic practitioners of film studies have traditionally been somewhat uneasy about unabashed cinephilia. This sort of queasiness reached its zenith during 1970s, an era when significant segment of professoriate swore puritanical allegiance to destruction of pleasure and considered discussion of aesthetic criteria irredeemably bourgeois. Film buffs were dismissed or lampooned for fetishizing the object and any vestige of was considered height of reactionary folly. In recent years, tide has shifted: New York University Cinema Studies Department even sponsored conference devoted to vicissitudes of cinephilia in 2002. Although it's possible to cynically assume that cinephilia is being carved out as another discipline and might well be mere fodder for next generation of graduate student essays, arrival of Movie Mutations: Changing Face of World Cinephilia suggests that serious discussion of stillthriving cinemaniac subculture need not be encumbered either fanzine buff trivia nor jargon. Academia is not demonized, but is occasionally targeted as domain whose superficial radicalism only serves to conceal its institutional conservatism. In one of anthology's pivotal exchanges on The Future of Academic Film Study, Adrian Martin, critic who has worked as journalist for Australian daily Age and is currently completing Ph.D. in film studies, maintains that academic film study tends (in general) towards safe consolidation of what is known, certain kind of consensus. And both Martin and James Naremore express fondness for late Raymond Durgnat, maverick critic whose unsystematic amalgam of surrealism and Romanticism (not to mention his skeptical view of contemporary film theory) made him frequently reviled figure in circles. Less programmatic than fiercely intuitive, Movie Mutations' ambitious, and to certain extent contradictory, agenda is outlined in conversation between Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin that serves as book's preface. Weary of substitution of methodologies borrowed from so-called social sciences for aesthetic judgments, Rosenbaum and Martin are determined to rehabilitate cinephilic concern for art and promote revamped, sophisticated version of auteurism. As Bill Krohn of Cahiers du observed on unapologetically auteurist message board a film by (http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/ group/a_film_by), problem is that auteurism as critical practice has always been minority taste while as marketing tool is now universal. contributors to Movie Mutations-a much-expanded version of series of exchanges that initially appeared in both French journal trafic and Berkeley-based Film Quarterly-are an eclectic assortment of critics, curators, and academics whose musings on recent global shifts in film culture address relationship of cinephilia to what has been termed transnational cinema. A series of emailed letters (at times they might be termed missives) between participants-which include Rosenbaum, Martin, Alexander Horwath, Nicole Brenez, Mark Peranson, Raymond Bellour, and Eduardo Antin (better known as Quintin)form core of book. Although this erudite convocation engages in some good-natured bickering concerning value of certain films and directors, all of these passionate cinephiles bemoan premature elegies for death of cinema issued jaundiced pundits like David Thomson, Susan Sontag, and even otherwise venerated Jean-Luc Godard. In addition, another of this collection's preoccupations explicitly reflected in its subtitle, the changing face of world cinephilia, underscores how an infatuation with inflected multicultural awareness can help to eradicate outdated parochial assumptions. …