I have, just today, been getting myself up to speed with the last year’s discussion of the state of cinephilia, beginning with Nico Baumbach’s “All That Heaven Allows: What Is, Or Was, Cinephilia?” in Film Comment, and hotlink hopscotching my way backwards through the collected essays of the 2011 Edinburgh Film Festival’s “Project: New Cinephilia.” (“When something is said to be dead or dying, we are bound to hear more about it than ever” asserts Baumbach’s piece, quite correctly.)
I had, in fact, been invited to weigh in on “Project: New Cinephilia,” but demurely declined—this was probably because I was busy dashing off a lucrative review of Marmaduke or something, but also because, as I recall saying to an inquisitive colleague in an e-mail: “I am not exactly certain what cinephilia is, but strongly suspect that it’s for creeps and I hate it.” Let this week’s jeremiad, then, make up for my previous absence.
What most immediately comes to my mind when the subject of cinephilia is brought up is a statement by Eric Rohmer, in a 1983 interview with Jean Narboni, which appears in the collection of Rohmer’s critical writings titled A Taste for Beauty:
“Cinema has more to fear from its own clichés than from those of the other arts. Right now, I despise, I hate, cinephile madness, cinephile culture . . . people whose culture is limited to the world of film, who think only through film, and when they make films, their films contain beings who exist only through film, whether the reminiscence of old films or the people in the profession. I think that there are other things in the world besides film and, conversely, that film feeds on things that exist outside it. I would even say that film is the art that can feed on itself the least.”
Now, of course, there are probably a thousand personal definitions of “cinephilia”—I see Kent Jones on “Project: New Cinephilia” using it as, essentially, a synonym for auteurism—but mine is Rohmer’s: A fashion of thinking about movies that is exclusive rather than inclusive, hermetic rather than open.
Rohmer’s condemnation is all the more resonant because it comes from one of the founding fathers of the very culture that is being decried, co-author (with Claude Chabrol) of one of the first book length studies of Alfred Hitchcock, and part of that 50s wave of French intellectuals who began the polemic dialogue that would, justly, earn the Seventh Art a prestige and stature equal to its predecessors. Pulling off such a putsch demanded of its conspirators a familiarity with the arts beyond cinema, so as to more persuasively argue that cinema belonged among them. Think of Truffaut’s bibliophilia, or the zanily enthusiastic Godard quotes that are dredged up every time the appropriate retrospective rolls around: “Robert Bresson… is the French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.” or “There was theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”
Even those not, by their own self-definition, participant in the auteurist struggle recognized that knowing movies alone wasn’t sufficient to talk about movies—per Pauline Kael, the motion-picture medium was “a bastard cross-fertilized super-art,” and as such required an acquaintance with the other arts that made up its component parts to discuss it properly. (This is not to bring up role that should be played, in the discussion of movies, of the business side of affairs, the imposition of technical limitations, and the actual experience of life as lived—all of which falls under the rubric of “the real world,” and which appears in movie-chat just about as often as the wider worlds of art do.)
If nothing else, one would think that young critics would be dissuaded from wholeheartedly accepting the tenets of previous generations’ cinephile culture by the very fact of its establishment: The frontier has been fenced! Where’s the opportunity to make your reputation? In turn, the great attraction of writing as a cinephile for fellow cinephiles, is rather easy to comprehend—by playing the connect-the-influences game, you can fill up your word count right quick and be home in time for dinner. (You may notice that I have skirted the issue of academic film writing, to which much of Mr. Baumbach’s piece is addressed. There is a very good reason for this: I can’t read that shit.)
I have a particularly vivid memory, dating to my 18th year, of being in a thrift store in the basement of the James Dean Museum in the actor’s hometown, Fairmount, Indiana. Among the fol-de-rol for sale—I left with a small cardboard cutout of a geriatric-looking Orson Welles in a movie called The Witching, which I have still never seen, though the cutout currently hangs on my bathroom door—there was a big, dumb green button that said ‘Movie Buff,’ which someone humorously suggested that I should buy. Now, obviously normal 18-year olds don’t pilgrimage to the graves of long-dead Hollywood actors (or commit B & E into the same actor’s shuttered, decaying former high school, so to see the rotting stage whose boards the same actor once strutted, and to find the spot on the wall where Morrissey signed his name in the “Suedehead” video), nor do they look forward to bringing home a copy of Scarlet Street more than they anticipate prom, but something about that ‘Movie Buff’ button filled me with instant recoil. And I suppose it’s the same for “cinephilia”—I’m not sure what it is, but it’s probably for creeps, so keep it way far away from me.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.