On the Political Challenges of the Cinephile Today

We wonder what characterizes today's struggle for cinephiles. First, who are the cinephiles? And what characterizes the cinephile? I feel that I run in cinephile circles in life and hence am one myself. Under this sign I proceed. For me this has nothing to do with pathology or even obsession, but instead the careful (but not necessarily academic or systematic) study of the cinema as an entire network, a universe, a life force and a reading key: quotations and allusions, yes, but also a "family history" for certain formal/stylistic approaches, and a toolbox of methodologies for tackling problems, e.g., Philippe Grandrieux working in a way that resurrects the old French avant-garde.¹ The cinephile comes in many shapes and sizes, and works toward many purposes. She is also marked by a certain restlessness that is never definable according to a perennial political or philosophical stance so much as a principle of searching and gathering information. The cinephile surveys the terrain in her own way, and the ways of her friends and teachers.

Auteur-centered cinephilia was once a polemical defense of some popular as well as some unpopular cinema. For a brief moment auteurism enjoyed pride of place in academic film studies before it was replaced by other methodologies and value systems (the much derided, even too derided Marxist-feminist-psychoanalytic theories of the 1970s and 1980s). In journalistic criticism, too, some of the more saleable extracts of the francophilic genealogy lived on (e.g., "the director is the auteur"), but other specific canonical hierarchies and linkages to art history and literature faded from view. In most journalistic discourse, Jerry Lewis—and his teacher, Frank Tashlin—are still butts of jokes about "the French," sad to say.

Auteurist cinephilia fought for the popular but only when it was "great" because it was argued to hold its own with the prevailing cultural standards.² Cultural studies overtook auteurism as the dominant method of academic and intellectual discussion of popular media products, at least in the anglo-phone sphere. This approach did a great deal of good in the 1970s and onward; at the same time, I fear it claimed as its own exlusive "turf" any intellectual discussion of these sorts of films. This precluded a lot of thinking about Hollywood or other popular media spaces in terms continuous with art historical practices. Scholarship focused on the sociopolitical aspects of mass communication and moved into much-needed studies of topics like fandom and reception. I am uncertain, though, that there has been sufficient development of this crucial dimension of cinema (and television) in tandem with the history of forms, symbols, and stylistic practices. Sometimes the materially discursive impact of audiovisual products is relatively transparent; in other cases a more oblique perspective helps—be it theory, connoisseurship, even an outsider's advantage.³ I hope that the new or renewed interest in Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and related scholars over the last few decades indicates a shift in this interdisciplinary, multi-objective direction.

Siegfried Kracauer wrote that the superficial expressions of an epoch are more strikingly communicative of the age than its more respectable, more controlled, and thus obsolete emanations.⁴ The "unheeded impulses" of the age are right there on the surface—so presumably people can learn more about the truth of the United States from American Idol and TMZ.com than we do from our major novelists, and maybe more from the Wachowski brothers (or, more to the point, Michael Bay) than those we categorize as important artists. In defending the "legitimate aesthetic pleasure" of these emanations, however, we must keep our heads. The production of articles, books, readers, courses, lectures, and so on about popular culture are themselves aesthetic emanations of the epoch—those "unheeded" impulses. This fundamental impulse, however, is alarmingly close to being heeded perfectly, of taking capitalism's products (and its prerequisite colonization of leisure time) as seriously as possible.

It was Walter Benjamin who famously asserted that the document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.⁵ Here and now, this embodied contradiction may be obvious to...