Note from the Editors

In Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), Diane Keaton inducts Ingmar Bergman into her own personal "Academy of the Overrated." Allen protests that "Bergman is the only genius in cinema today." It's a classic encounter between pseudo-intellectual and obsessive cinephile. It's also a dated encounter, capturing a moment when a devoted moviegoer, weaned on Truffaut, Godard, and Bergman in the postwar era, could still catch a film by a master auteur at a New York City revival house almost any day of the week. Many revival houses have closed since then, and the old European "geniuses" have mostly receded. But today's cinephiles attend festivals, set their DVRs to capture obscure gems on Turner Classic Movies, scrounge up old out-of-print VHS tapes, and tithe a substantial portion of their incomes to the Criterion Collection. (Cinephiles clung to TV in the pre-digital days as well—both Grand Illusion [Jean Renoir, 1937] and an unnamed W. C. Fields film surface on TV in Manhattan.) Today's devotees have also found a new set of directors upon whom to focus their energies. With this book review feature, we turn to books about four non-European auteurs who inspire cinephilia. Andrei Tarkovsky's work is historically closest to the postwar wave, though outside of that wave's Western European center, while the American cult director Abel Ferrara symbolizes the cinephilia fostered by the rise of videotape in the 1980s. In company with directors such as Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas Kiarostami, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the Japanese Takeshi Kitano mark contemporary cinephilia's richly international scope.