Philistines and Cinephiles: The New Deal

1. 1. There is first a problem with the French word "cinephilia," which, as Genevieve Sellier¹ and Noël Burch have shown,² is a modernist, formalist, and masculine attachment to cinema—and not at all, thus, the equivalent of the love of cinema. The "cinephilia" of De Baecque (whose book is an "essay," and not the rigorous ethnological study of a behavior), is a Parisian version of this cinephilia. And it has not varied since the time of Cahiers du cinéma (the 1950/1960s): there is still a cult of Great Men (the "Auteurs"), esotericism, aestheticism, sexism, and especially a "disgust for the taste of others," in the words of Pierre Bourdieu. One sees it clearly when one talks to a Parisian critic:³ he/she conforms still to the Baudelairian model of "the one who knows" (how to appreciate Modernity), above the "vulgar taste" of the public. It is amusing, in this sense, to read the petition that Jean Douchet wrote at the time of the bad financial press about Cahiers, titled "For the future of Cahiers du cinéma," which was published in various journals in April 2008: "The cinema concerns us all in a pressing way: artists, philosophers, writers, filmmakers, critics, actors, directors of festivals. . . ." It lacks only one category of people: those who are not part of this "little world," that is to say, common mortals!

2. 2. Then, there is the love of cinema, which is, alas, called in France "popular cinephilia" (while it is the cinephilia à la De Baecque that would have to be called "elitist cinephilia," in order to leave the term "cinephilia" to refer alone to the love of cinema). This love has existed for a very long time, and was always organized as a personal or collective cult, whether by the "reader responses" of the film magazines from the 1930s or the cine-clubs of the 1940s.⁴ Today, in France, it is found still in the magazines (Premiere, Studio, and all the specialist revues, like Mad Movies, for gore, which prints every month as many copies as the Cahiers du cinéma). But there are new practices added now: the discussion sites and forums on the Internet, which make more or less public the debate of fans around their favorite films, and the screening (also more or less collective) of DVDs, their loan, and their exchange. The passage from the theater screen to the TV screen also bears a sociological importance, since one no longer has to live in the center of a large city to see rare films. However, these new technologies do not change fundamentally the esprit de culte, which remains the same as in other spheres of art.⁵

3. 3. The central paradigm of cinephilies is always the same. In the "elitist cinephilia," it is always the Kantian aesthetic, based on intuition, the ineffable, the immediate sense of dealing with an Artist or an Artwork.⁶ In the "popular cinephilia," it is always the expertise. An expert is someone who has experience: he has seen many films and discusses especially qualities of one in relation to qualities of the other. For example, to make a sociological observation in the manner of Becker,⁷ one can learn to love the films of kung fu only after having seen some hundreds of kung fu films, so that one can detect the small differences that confer value on one film and mediocrity on another. Otherwise, one remains a philistine, not a cinephile. But the technological changes of these last twenty-five years favor largely this paradigm of expertise: it has effectively become easy (either legally, or illegally) to see entire filmographies. One can order or pirate on the Internet some thousands of films once impossible to find, and acquire an enormous culture in several months. As for the miscegenous character of the "new cinephilia," whose members like equally films, TV series, and video clips, that is not new either: the "young Turks" of the Nouvelle Vague were obsessed by literature, almost more than by the cinema.

4. 4. This changes something for the history of styles. Thanks...