Introduction

This dossier on cinephilia gathers responses to the following question:

"What is being fought for by today's cinephilia(s)?

At the end La Cinéphilie (2003), Antoine de Baecque wrote that classical cinephilia died in 1968, following the failure of cinema to film the political events of that year. Since that time, still according to de Baecque, the terrain of cinephilia changed radically as television and publicity/advertising 'invaded the domain of images.' The proliferation of images has only accelerated with technological change ever since, hurtling through the Internet and telecommunications.

Whatever the current status of cinephilia, certainly there are new cinephiles, even if they no longer hone their passion primarily in film theaters. But what is being fought for in this new generation of cinephilia? What causes animate cinephilia today and how are these new modes different from the 'classical cinephilia'?

If, in particular, the Cahiers du cinéma critics won their battles for auteurism, now part of most critics' lingua franca, are there new critical paradigms of emergent polemics to complement, replace, or contest the earlier cinephilia? Has the institutionalization of film studies as a discipline depleted cinephilia of its social or aesthetic urgency?"

In asking our question regarding contemporary cinephilia, we wondered whether these writers and critics could or would identify a polemical thrust driving cinephiles and their critical practice today. We sought to pose the question to cinephiles who speak to a public of general film watchers, as opposed to asking academics, for example, who often write for other academics, though some of the respondents in this dossier also work in academia. Are there particular issues or causes at stake among these self-identified cinephiles, film lovers, and critics? The majority of the contributors answer the question obliquely, assessing more the contemporary status and conditions of possibility of cinephilia, rather than overtly advocating critical positions, causes, adversaries, battles, or mobilizing intellectual, political, or ideological principles found in earlier generations of cinephiles, whether auteurism, structuralism, feminism, or Marxism. The contributors seem interested instead in providing definitions for cinephilia in its contemporary contexts. Taking this into account, a more subtle set of concerns, and indeed positions, emerge out of this body of responses.

One broad strand aims to define what cinephilia today has become, teasing out the ways that new technologies have altered public and private exhibition. Technological changes in the media/image industries have radically transformed spectatorship since the cinémathéque days of the Cahiers critics. Most of the respondents, if not all, evince little nostalgia for forms of film viewing/spectatorship prior to these changes. Video and copyright scholar Lucas Hilderbrand, eschewing normative judgment, notes that the first major technological change, the introduction of reproduction on VHS tapes, draws attention to an epistemological difference. He notes that video makes us more aware of certain aspects of film, such as framing or sociality, suggesting that video formats have since the 1970s re-mediated the value of theatrical exhibition. Film blogger Girish Shambu sees the emerging cinephile blogosphere providing a new role for the amateur and conceives of the Internet as a space for a more egalitarian cinephile "learning community." Shambu's positioning of the amateur as outside of institutional affiliations—newspapers, academia, film programming—envisions the cinephile "refusing limits," and implicitly escaping the institutional boundaries of a professionalized public film discourse. For Jonathan Rosenbaum, child of a theater-owning family and now an indefatigable guide for DVD information and assessment, the profusion of available titles in what curator James Quandt calls a "visual souk" has no baleful effect on cinephilia, though it does place even more pressure on critics to preserve aesthetic distinctions. Only one respondent, Quandt, views films on non-celluloid support as simply different objects: the new technologies and delivery systems efface the colors, rhythm, and experience of the originals, turning any putative cinephilia constructed around such denatured works into an oxymoron.

Several authors, perhaps more theoretically inclined, claim that digital technology has actually changed filmmaking, and cinephilia with it. For Chris Fujiwara, film critic and author, classical cinephilia solicited the viewer's restoration of authorial intention normally "deformed by commercial and...