On the Political Challenges of the Cinephile Today

Abstract

We wonder what characterizes today's struggle for cinephiles. First, who are cinephiles? And what characterizes cinephile? I feel that I run in cinephile circles in life and hence am one myself. Under this sign I proceed. For me this has nothing to do with pathology or even obsession, but instead careful (but not necessarily academic or systematic) study of cinema as an entire network, a universe, a life force and a reading key: quotations and allusions, yes, but also a family for certain formal/stylistic approaches, and a toolbox of methodologies for tackling problems, e.g., Philippe Grandrieux working in a way that resurrects old French avantgarde. 1 The cinephile comes in many shapes and sizes, and works toward many purposes. She is also marked by a certain restlessness that is never definable according to a perennial political or philosophical stance so much as a principle of searching and gathering information. The cinephile surveys terrain in her own way, and ways of her friends and teachers. Auteur-centered cinephilia was once a polemical defense of some popular as well as some unpopular cinema. For a brief moment auteurism enjoyed pride of place in academic film studies before it was replaced by other methodologies and value systems (the much derided, even too derided Marxistfeminist- psychoanalytic theories of 1970s and 1980s). In journalistic criticism, too, some of more saleable extracts of francophilic genealogy lived on (e.g., the director is auteur), but other specific canonical hierarchies and linkages to art history and literature faded from view. In most journalistic discourse, Jerry Lewis-and his teacher, Frank Tashlin-are still butts of jokes about the French, sad to say. Auteurist cinephilia fought for popular but only when it was because it was argued to hold its own with prevailing cultural standards.2 Cultural studies overtook auteurism as dominant method of academic and intellectual discussion of popular media products, at least in anglophone sphere. This approach did a great deal of good in 1970s and onward; at same time, I fear it claimed as its own exlusive turf any intellectual discussion of these sorts of films. This precluded a lot of thinking about Hollywood or other popular media spaces in terms continuous with art historical practices. Scholarship focused on sociopolitical aspects of mass communication and moved into much-needed studies of topics like fandom and reception. I am uncertain, though, that there has been sufficient development of this crucial dimension of cinema (and television) in tandem with history of forms, symbols, and stylistic practices. Sometimes materially discursive impact of audiovisual products is relatively transparent; in other cases a more oblique perspective helps-be it theory, connoisseurship, even an outsider's advantage.3 I hope that new or renewed interest in Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and related scholars over last few decades indicates a shift in this interdisciplinary, multi-objective direction. Siegfried Kracauer wrote that superficial expressions of an epoch are more strikingly communicative of age than its more respectable, more controlled, and thus obsolete emanations.4 The impulses of age are right there on surface-so presumably people can learn more about truth of United States from American Idol and TMZ.com than we do from our major novelists, and maybe more from Wachowski brothers (or, more to point, Michael Bay) than those we categorize as important artists. In defending legitimate aesthetic pleasure of these emanations, however, we must keep our heads. The production of articles, books, readers, courses, lectures, and so on about popular culture are themselves aesthetic emanations of epoch-those unheeded impulses. This fundamental impulse, however, is alarmingly close to being heeded perfectly, of taking capitalism's products (and its prerequisite colonization of leisure time) as seriously as possible. …