Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory

* pb ‘Cinephilia’ 07-06-2005 11:02 Pagina 1 The anthology Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory explores new periods, practices and definitions of what it means to love the cinema. [EDS.] AND HAGENER CINEPHILIA DE VALCK The essays demonstrate that beyond individu- FILM FILM alist immersion in film, typical of the cinephilia as it was popular from the 1950s to the 1970s, CULTURE CULTURE a new type of cinephilia has emerged since the IN TRANSITION IN TRANSITION 1980s, practiced by a new generation of equally devoted, but quite differently networked cinephiles. The film lover of today embraces and uses new technology while also nostalgically remembering and caring for outdated media for- mats. He is a hunter-collector as much as a mer- chant-trader, a duped consumer as much as a media-savvy producer. Marijke de Valck is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies, Uni- versity of Amsterdam. Malte Hagener teaches Film and Media Studies at CinephiliaCinephilia the Department of Media Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Movies,Movies, LoveLove andand MemoryMemory ISBN 90-5356-768-2 EDITEDEDITED BY BY MARIJKEMARIJKE DE DE VALCK VALCK MALTEMALTE HAGENER HAGENER 9 789053 567685 Amsterdam University Press AmsterdamAmsterdam UniversityUniversity PressPress WWW.AUP.NL Cinephilia Cinephilia Movies, Love and Memory Edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener Amsterdam University Press Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 90 5356 768 2 (paperback) isbn 90 5356 769 0 (hardcover) nur 674 © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2005 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures 11 Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener I. The Ramifications of Cinephilia: Theory and History Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment 27 Thomas Elsaesser Dreams of Lost Time 45 A Study of Cinephilia and Time Realism in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers Sutanya Singkhra Mass Memories of Movies 55 Cinephilia as Norm and Narrative in Blockbuster Culture Drehli Robnik LoveintheTimeofTransculturalFusion 65 Cinephilia, Homage and Kill Bill Jenna Ng II. Technologies of Cinephilia: Production and Consumption RemasteringHongKongCinema 83 Charles Leary Drowning in Popcorn at the International Film Festival Rotterdam? 97 The Festival as a Multiplex of Cinephilia Marijke de Valck 6 Cinephilia Ravenous Cinephiles 111 Cinephilia, Internet, and Online Film Communities Melis Behlil Re-disciplining the Audience 125 Godard’s Rube-Carabinier Wanda Strauven The Original Is Always Lost 135 Film History, Copyright Industries and the Problem of Reconstruction Vinzenz Hediger III. Techniques of Cinephilia: Bootlegging and Sampling The Future of Anachronism 153 Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons Elena Gorfinkel Conceptual Cinephilia 169 On Jon Routson’s Bootlegs Lucas Hilderbrand Playing the Waves 181 The Name of the Game is Dogme Jan Simons The Parenthesis and the Standard 197 On a Film by Morgan Fisher Federico Windhausen The Secret Passion of the Cinephile 211 Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts Meets Adriaan Ditvoorst’s De Witte Waan Gerwin van der Pol Biographies 223 Index of Names 227 Index of Film Titles 233 Acknowledgements The idea for this anthology originated with a number of discussions and confer- ences that took place from to in between New York, Amsterdam and London that created so much activity that we decided to put together an anthology. This volume would have been impossible without Elena Gorfinkel and Charles Leary, who initiated the Cinephilia conference series and organized the first conference in New York in February . A meeting in Amsterdam in June was followed a year later by a conference in London, organized by Jenna Ng and David Forgacs. We have to pay tribute to everybody who partici- pated in making this extended series of exchanges possible. We also thank Tho- mas Elsaesser and the University of Amsterdam, in particular the Department of Media Studies, for supporting us with the second conference in in Am- sterdam as with this publication. Marijke de Valck / Malte Hagener Amsterdam, June Introduction Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephi- lia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener Cinephilia in the New Media Age From a historical perspective, the term cinephilia is Janus-faced. On the one hand, it alludes to the universal phenomenon that the film experience evokes particular sensations of intense pleasure resulting in a strongly felt connection with the cinema, often described as a relation of love. Cinephiles worldwide continue to be captured and enraptured by the magic of moving images. They cherish personal moments of discovery and joy, develop affectionate rituals, and celebrate their love in specialized communities. On the other hand, the term covers practices and discourses in which the term cinephilia is appropriated for dogmatic agendas. The most successful of these practices has beyond question been the “politique des auteurs.” Colin MacCabe points out that the “politique des auteurs” was not only concerned with establishing the primacy of the film- maker-director, but also aimed at the creation of a new “perfect” audience. When watching Hollywoodfilms, the young French film critics Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and companions discovered they had passionate preferences for certain filmmakers, mostly popular Hollywood directors, which they conse- quently set out to legitimize in their writings in Cahiers du Cinéma. It is this dis- course that MacCabe credits with the construction of an “omniscient cinéphile” archetype that became central to the (elitist) mode of film reception known as cinephilia. Initiated in the s, cinephilia came to full bloom in the s thanks to the success of the Nouvelle Vague in France and abroad, but also the lively debates in the film magazines Positif, Cahiers du Cinéma and the discussions by the cinephiles congregating around the Cinema MacMahon and other Parisian movie houses. It is here at this possible point of origin (there are other moments one could single out as foundational ) that cinephilia presents its double nature: it dotes on the most popular genre film(maker)s of the most popular national film industry, yet it does so in a highly idiosyncratic, elitist, and often counterintu- itive fashion. Cinephilia in its French attire of the s is simultaneously demo- cratic since it takes a popular cultural form very seriously while also being 12 Cinephilia snobbishly aristocratic about it because it replaces traditional hierarchies (in which film was found at the lower end of the continuum) with new, similarly dogmatic taste preferences. In its classic form, cinephilia distinguishes between “auteurs” and “metteurs-en-scène” on the side of production, and, on the side of reception, between those who can recognize certain distinctions – namely the cinephiles – and those who cannot. Like Colin MacCabe, Paul Willemen positions cinephilia in the French cultural context. To the unchallenged credits for the “politique des auteurs” he adds influence of the s debates on photogénie: “[W]e first of all have to realise that it [cinephilia] is a French term, located in a particular rationalisation or at- tempted explanation of a relationship to cinema that is embedded in French cultural discourses. The privileged moment of that history seems to me to be the notion of photogénie. Photogénie was the first major attempt to theorise a relationship to the screen.” Because these French discourses went hand in hand with a flourishing and internationally acclaimed film culture, the practice of Parisian cinephiles from the s to the s could acquire the status of a classic case that is often abstracted in essentialist fashion from its historical spe- cificity and mistaken as being synonymous with the phenomenon as such. De- spite counter-voices, such as Annette Michelson who reminds us that cinephilia has not one “proper” form but many for different historical periods, the appeal of the Parisian archetype continues to be very powerful and recurrently informs contemporary debates. When Susan Sontag proclaimed the death of cinema in she in effect de- clared the incompatibility of the classic cinephile archetype with the contemporary state of the cinema. In her influential article “The Decay of Cinema” she juxtaposes the heyday of cinephilia – the time when “the full-time cinephile [was] always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row center”–with the present in which it is hard to find “at least among the young, that distinctive cinephilic love of movies.” A love for movies is not enough for Sontag, but a “certain taste” and continuous investments in “cinema’s glorious past” are necessary as well. Thus even in her seemingly neu- tral choice of words Sontag is crystal clear about the superiority of the cinephile movement that can be traced back to Truffaut’s manifesto on “a certain ten- dency of the French cinema.” She holds on to the memory of classical cinephilia characterized by the persistence of devoted cinephiles to track down and watch rare movies projected in off-beat and often run-down exhibition venues in a segregated atmosphere of elevated pleasure. The discrepancy of the contemporary form of cinephilia with this nostalgic image results not in a revision of her conception of cinephilia but in a declaration of its death. Our contention is that, since the s, cinephilia has transformed itself. Nowadays it is practiced by a new generation of equally devoted cinephiles Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? 13 who display and develop new modes of engagement with the over-abundance of cinematic material widely available through advanced technology.

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