What Is Being Fought For by Today's Cinephilia(s)?

What marks today's cinephilia? What makes it distinct and different? Before I offer my thoughts, before I even begin to speak, let me try to sketch, in a few brief strokes, a picture of the place from which I speak.

I suspect that I'm an atypical member of this dossier group. I'm an academic but not in film/media studies or even the humanities. I'm a cinephile but my connection to cinema is one of avocation; in this sense, I'm a cinema amateur, a word I use to reclaim the seriousness of commitment contained in its original meaning ("lover"). From its beginnings, my cinephilia always existed in a context, a landscape, that included two key technologies: Internet and DVD/video, both of which play a central role in my cinephilic practice.

Antione de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux define cinephilia—succinctly, beautifully—as "life organized around films."¹ Their account is set in the 1970s, but I'm struck by the resonance, the relevance, it carries for us today. In essence, their generation found itself confronting a crisis of action: the early polemical battles of auteurism had been won; the important touchstone writings had been produced; the discipline of film studies had been born; and all the great filmmakers had been discovered (or so it seemed). What was left to do that would be meaningful, original, and historically aware? The solution turned out to be this: to perform a "creative act of substitution" in which printed words on the page became every bit as important as projected images on the screen.² Reading about cinema—and everything related to cinema—became an essential source of cinephilic pleasure. I relate this account because, thirty years hence, I find certain important continuities with today's cinephilic practices—specifically those that live and thrive on the Internet in what has come to be known as the film "blogosphere."

Blogs—short for "weblogs"—are personal websites that can be created quickly and for free. They are open and accessible to all on the Internet, and often feature journal-like writings, frequently not in a highly worked-over or perfected state. The early years of the worldwide web are referred to as the Web 1.0 era, when data and text were uploaded to the Internet for widespread access, but without great capability for interaction or frequent (dynamic) updating and change. In the last few years, a period characterized by information technologists as Web 2.0, the Internet has seen rapid growth in real-time (delay-less) interaction, social networking capabilities, and user-generated content sites like YouTube. Blogs are an excellent example of the Web 2.0 paradigm.

All this opens up possibilities for new modes of engagement with cinema. Even if she may not have had the Internet in mind at the time (1997), Nicole Brenez made many prescient observations about contemporary cinephilia: (a) it is different from classical cinephilia because it is a distinct "mode of existence"; (b) it espouses "a refusal of established limits"; and (c) it is interested in how disparate filmmakers can be used to "clarify" each other (e.g., John Woo and Malcolm Le Grice).3 Her words find correspondences in today's Internet cinephilic practices. Each day, in this new "mode of existence," hundreds of cinephiles put up new posts, start new conversations (while building upon old ones), come in contact with new ideas, and slowly expand their social networks. The typical serious Internet cinephile engages in such work not just casually but nearly every single day, all year long. It's good to remember here that this work occurs almost completely outside economic imperatives; hardly anyone makes a penny from any of their writings in the blogosphere. As the diversity of these cinephiles increases—both in terms of their international origins and the various kinds of cinema that interest them—we see a gradual erosion of previously existing limits and borders. Some cinephiles practice new forms of film criticism with YouTube DVD/video clips that juxtapose film fragments from a variety of sources—images and...