Cinematic Promiscuity: Cinephilia after Videophilia

If there was a "politique" to the Cahiers du cinéma crew's "politique des auteurs," it was about taking popular culture seriously by elevating certain directors to the status of artists. This continental model certainly elicited an aspiration to "serious" filmgoing Stateside. But around the same time, a more crassly American cinephilia was eloquently captured in the first chapter of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer (1961) by a cinema marquee slogan: "Where Happiness Costs So Little." At the risk of being essentialist, if the French model of cinephilia was about films and erudition, America film buffery has been about how good movies make you feel—and how easily.

In the past three decades, home video has radically altered cinephilia by making movie love even more diffused. The politics of video have, from the beginning, been a politics of access. Home video technologies facilitated a new relationship to movies, and a collector culture exploded in ways different from the preexisting memorabilia or small-gauge film markets. In the early history of home video, manufacturers such as Sony did not envision the technology for releasing movies, and the Hollywood studios originally wanted nothing to do with it. Rather, it was buffs who made their own recordings and small business owners who developed the video store industry.¹ Movie lovers defined how home video would be used.

For a time, film purists took reactionary positions against video—even if video made the films cinephiles loved more accessible. Film scholars were likewise ambivalent about video. Two articles by Charles Tashiro illustrate this well: in "Videophilia" (1991), Tashiro examines the aesthetic damage done by VHS releases that pan-and-scan, crop, or uncrop theatrical aspect ratios, whereas in "The Contradictions of Video Collecting" (1996), he acknowledges the pleasures of owning movies on video.² More alarming, in 1991 members of the Society of Cinema Studies issued a statement asserting that using video for class screenings, which had become a practical reality, threatened to undermine the integrity of the discipline. (This political position was targeted less at video per se than at campus administrators seeking to cut film rental budgets.)³ And although I have asserted a particular and affective aesthetic for analog video elsewhere, let's be honest: classroom video projectors exaggerate the limited resolution of VHS, making everything look ugly.

But video also remediated and legitimated cinema. Home video revalorized cinematic exhibition and recognition of the specificities of celluloid and public viewing; VHS made film look better by comparison, and DVD letterboxing calls attention to framing. Even if I am one of the video generation, I still love projected celluloid and make distinctions in how I see specific works. But what home video revealed about cinema was not only a purity of the image; it also allows for the recognition of a kind of public sphere at screenings that cannot exist for home video. Part of the pleasure of going to retrospectives, festivals, and cinematheques is the audience; even if social interactions rarely occur and a true community never quite coalesces, there is at least a kind of identification that occurs when fellow film buffs come together. Screenings in public venues are by definition shared experiences.

This classic sort of cinephilia can only exist in cosmopolitan urban locations: New York, Paris, London, San Francisco. As a kid and teenager in a small town, I spent most of my spare time watching videos from the public library, video store, or grocery store (which had cheaper new releases). I was a voracious videophile. Living in New York City later was a cinephile's dream. Most of the art theaters are shit holes with uncomfortable seats, bad sight-lines, and lousy sound systems, but you can see just about anything. Now I live in Southern California, where the theaters are generally nicer and there are still actual movie palaces. But there are far fewer classics, foreign art films, or obscurities to see. LA cinephilia, logically, is more about fascination with the Hollywood golden age than with the underground or the global. And it seems to be more active in video stores such as Eddie...