Reflections on the Recent Cinephilia Debates

Abstract

as phenomenon (cultural, historical, geopolitical), as experience (collective, individual), and as knowledge (fascination, reflection, interpretation). The contributions to this In Focus interface more readily with the latter approach, and have been organized along just such a circuit, from outside to inside?with the curious, happy coincidence of the final two concerning themselves with two American films from 1931. But these pa tently unapologetic textual analyses are not merely concerned with their chosen films, but also with what the films provoke outside of their own skins: their sociological con texts, their relations to other films, the various techne that weave the cocoons inside which they metamorphose into fluttering beings that captivate in their ephemerality and impermanence. What emerges, in the end, is the overwhelmingly physical dispo sition of film, how it figures bodies, machines, rooms, landscapes, and their relation as forms of deferral beyond the space and time of the film itself, leaving it for us to rescue, to explore, and to articulate?though not to complete?their moments of inscrutable pleasure. It is this sense of wonderment that academic film studies lost somewhere along its way, and through a renewed engagement with cinephilia might yet regain. *