Cinephilia and the Imagination of Filmmaking

Accompanying the changes that cinephilia has undergone since 1968 (also since 1978 and, perhaps more to the point of this inquiry, since 1998) have been changes not only in actual cinema production but in conceptions of the construction of a film.

What can now be called classical cinephilia is tied to a certain idealization of what it is to make a film, in the sense that while watching a film by, say, Mizoguchi, Sternberg, Sirk, or Mario Bava, the cinephile, putting himself or herself in the imaginary position of the person who is constructing and linking the images, seeks to reconstruct the logic of the author. To watch a film is to experience the unfolding of this logic, in such a way that one feels called on, and enabled, to take responsibility for it.

This is not merely or even primarily a matter of the imaginative identification with a creative genius working at full potency. Instead, cinephilia is more particularly the sense (well conveyed in Godard's reviews of Ray's Hot Blood [US, 1956] and The True Story of Jesse James [US, 1957], among other early Cahiers texts) that the work, having been deformed by commercial and ideological pressures and perhaps abandoned by or taken away from its author, now remains to be completed by the viewer, whom its imperfections and incoherences invite to assume the role of a collaborator. This the viewer can best do by becoming first a critic, then a filmmaker.

Films that lend themselves to this sort of viewing are still made, but they are not, it is generally agreed, the most important films being made. The great authorial models of cinephilic cinema—the art of mise-en-scène as practiced in mass-entertainment cinema—belong to the past. (Which is not to say that more discoveries, no doubt very rich ones, are not still to be made in various national "classical" cinemas, or that no new insights into already well-known films and auteurs are possible.) Cinephilic mise-en-scène has been largely superseded by other forms of logical construction of images and sounds. First, there are films (which we could call post-cinephilic) that acknowledge their own lateness within cinema, their advent after the closure of an era and a system—films of mourning and nostalgia, pastiche, or conscious renovation. With such films, the viewer's imaginary participation in the construction of images is complicated, dampened, or foreclosed by the fact that it is a second-degree construction, one designed to refer to another cinematic construction that is usually not present. The films of Wenders in the 1970s are key examples of the nostalgic subcategory, and, indeed, Wenders's career, since the two early 1980s crisis films that are Der Stand der Dinge/The State of Things (DE/PT, 1982) and Hammett (US, 1982), may be seen as a metaphor and encapsulation of post-cinephilia. The enormous success and current legendary stature of Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (DE, 1987) would seem to present an interesting case study in post-cinephilic cinephilia.

Second, films by directors as varied as Hou, Tarr, Kubrick, Malick, and Sokurov have elaborated a kind of work on the image that is outside the concerns and the domain of classical cinephilia. These films immerse themselves in the present time of the image (as do Tarkovsky's films) and make secondary the kind of long-term calculation about formal structures that is so essential with, say, Lang. They are non-cinephilic films, in the sense that they do not solicit (and perhaps discourage) the viewer's illusory assumption of responsibility for a logic of filmic construction. Instead they make possible a contemplation of filmic space in its integrity and call for an ever sharper and deeper perception of the immediate profilmic material.

On the side of the viewer, the most important shift has been the time-shift: the fact that with video, and now even more with DVD, the time of the film is subjected, if only in potential, to a secondary logic or chronology that is private rather than collective (so that, if...