1 This question has taken me toward cinema as site of time and history, to cinephilia's mythic history and to cinema's own unique relation to time. The object of love is at crossroad in its history, between technologies, eras, and so on that bring its multiple temporalities into sharp relief. The cinema not only carries history within it (as in Histoire(s) du cinema) but also materializes time in instants and duration, in reality and fiction. If cinephilia now has an immediate and useful purpose, it might well be to turn to cinema as lesson in time, its visualisation and its passing that, on one hand, leads to history and cinema's referentiality and, on other, leads to marvelous and ineffable in cinema's temporality. As Jean Epstein pointed out, cinema's fusion of static and mobile, discontinuous and continuous, seems to fly in face of nature, a transformation as amazing as generation of life from inanimate things. But, in present context, alongside these temporalities are those of cinephilia itself. As its original conditions of being have receded (along with cigarette smoke that had fueled them) into past, idea of loving cinema becomes conscious stance that stretches back into twentieth century so that contemporary cinephile lives problem of continuities and discontinuities of time. Perhaps, however, this would be less so if it were not for specific and identifiable nature of cinephilia's origins . . . part history, part myth . . . infused with legendary glamour, accumulating rather than losing its hold over later generations of cinephiles as it still continues to reverberate down decades. 2 I was recently reading Pierre Nora's Lieux de memoire (or rather I was reading concluding essay and looking casually at some of specific when it struck me that heroic period of Henri Langlois's Cinemateque and its contemporary Cahiers du cinema would have fitted very appropriately into collection. While existing on one level as concrete cultural institutions, both were stuff and sites of myth. Contemporaneously, they organized and systematized history of cinema so unsystematically and anti-institutionally that emerged into cultural discourse with their magic untarnished, fueling marvelous but amorphous cinephilia of 1950s Paris. While cinema was idealized in this cinephile culture, it also acquired symbolic status as idea. In retrospect, Cahiers/Cinemateque synchronicity revitalized and reinvented 1920s cinephilia, and also launched something completely new, St. John Baptist to explosion of cultures that was to come. These myth-generating institutions have, of course, themselves become mythic: perpetual point of historic reference for future cinephiles (as they rather sadly watched the movies mature into film studies) and for increasingly diverse, ever younger, global spread of cinephiles (precisely produced by film studies). Although Cinemateque and Cahiers as lieu share particular Frenchness that essentially characterizes Nora lieux, specific national and historical nature of that cinephile moment has been overtaken by collective, international nostalgia. This sense of loss, simple product of inevitable passing of time, always an element in cinephilia, is also accentuated by changes in loved object itself. 3 Nora comments on way that passion for memory overtook France in 1990s in form of collective holding on to past as it seemed to slip away under combined pressures of social, political, and economic change. Although these particular shifts are not immediately relevant, sense of loss and associated upsurges of memory have parallels in recent history of cinema. As cinema underwent those transformations of 1990s that brought so many pronouncements of its death, so cinephiles began to reflect (perfectly rationally) on passing of special, ritualistic conditions of watching films, obsessive habits of moviegoing and love of moments and fragments that had characterized their preferred form of spectatorship. …