Cinephilia

AMERICAN CINEPHILIA

While the terminology and aesthetics of cinephilia may be most closely associated with French film criticism, a similar critical passion for cinema developed in North America during the same period. In the 1940s critics such as James Agee (1909–1955) and Robert Warshow (1917–1955) were writing about cinema with a passionate investment akin to that of the French critics. In their case, they were engaging even more directly in the culture wars of high and low categories of taste, a mantle taken up by critics such as Pauline Kael (1919–2001) and Andrew Sarris (b. 1928) in the 1960s. These critics may not have espoused a consistent aesthetic theory, yet their writing did begin from the premise that good film-making had merit not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also as a politics of taste. Allowing the cinema into the canons of "art" entailed a challenge to traditional cultural institutions and authorities for whom cinema was a "mass medium." In this sense, cinephilia was closely linked to anti-establishment, leftist—or at least liberal—politics, although the affinities between cinephilia and cultural politics have always been difficult to sustain.

In the late 1960s Godard may have been pushing his cinephilia into an activist, politicized cinema, but in the United States another kind of avant-garde had formed around a quite different manifestation of cinephilia. The New American Cinema investigated the specific properties of film, stripping it of its industrial components such as (in its most extreme forms) actors, stories, and scripts, to produce a purified experience of watching movies in the dark. The Invisible Cinema constructed in New York City at Anthology Film Archives in 1970 was designed to block out the viewer's peripheral vision that might detract from the pure and completely fixed gaze at the screen. The "perverse cinephilia" of the New American Cinema was no less fetishistic than the cinephilia described by Metz in its fascination with the image, projection, and darkness, coupled with the knowledge of the mechanics behind the experience of watching articulated as aesthetic form. The proponents of this alternative cinema—Stan Brakhage (1933–2003), Michael Snow (b. 1929), Andy Warhol (1927–1987), Hollis Frampton (1936–1984), and many others—espoused a love for cinema so intense that they attempted to redeem it from the corrupted entertainment culture that had come to dominate the medium.

Linking these very different cinephiles is a shared passion for the rituals of moviegoing, of entering the darkness and giving oneself over to the power of the image. Before the Invisible Cinema, experimental films were screened alongside Hollywood films and the international art cinema at film societies such as Cinema 16. This New York–based institution, under the direction of Amos Vogel (b. 1921), programmed an eclectic mix of films, including documentaries and silent cinema from 1947 to 1963. Vogel's mantra was that film viewing was in itself a subversive act, and for him the "good film" is one that fascinates the viewer, liberating him or her from the repressive tendencies of everyday life. Henri Langlois's (1914–1977) Cinémathèque Française in Paris incarnated a similar cultural politics during roughly the same period. Established in 1935, the Cinémathèque provided the formative education of the Cahiers critics and New Wave filmmakers. Cinephilia is very much responsible for the archival activities of the international association of cinematheques that remain dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of the wealth of film history.