Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Cinephilia
fetish becomes a form of knowledge (ibid., p. 75).
Cinephilia, in other words, enables the semiotician to
love the cinema while gaining a critical distance from
its lure.
The limitations of Metz’s film theory, such as its
universalizing thrust and restriction to a certain kind of
‘‘classical’’ narrative cinema, are extensive and wellknown.
However, his theorization of cinephilia as a
complex form of desire is a useful definition to retain.
Metz’s reference to the French New Wave locates his
understanding of cinephilia within film-historical terms
and contextualizes his psychoanalytic-semiotic paradigm.
The filmmaker-critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma
in the late 1950s and early 1960s embodied the notion of
cinephilia and may even be said to have turned from
writing film criticism to filmmaking precisely to overcome
the kind of contradictions that Metz identifies at
the heart of the fascination and obsession with cinema.
The love of cinema to which the Cahiers critics were
dedicated can in fact be traced even further back to their
shared mentor, André Bazin. ‘‘The cinema,’’ said Bazin,
‘‘is an idealistic phenomenon’’ (What, p. 17). In his
seminal essay, ‘‘The Myth of Total Cinema,’’ he argued
that film history is guided by the passions of men for an
‘‘integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own
image,’’ and he proceeded to develop a style of film
criticism that privileged those filmmakers who, he felt,
came closest to realizing the ideal of a ‘‘total cinema’’—
Jean Renoir (1894–1979), Roberto Rossellini (1906–
1977), Orson Welles (1915–1985), and Kenji Mizoguchi
(1898–1956) (ibid., p. 21). He loved their long takes
and deep focus strategies by which the world seemed to
offer itself up to the viewer. Moreover, he wrote about
films with an unmitigated enthusiasm for stylistic achievements
alongside an appreciation for the emotional weight
of a film’s effect on its viewer. Bazin may not have been
the first cinephile, but his essays on cinema initiated a
critical discourse on cinema that was stimulated by an
acknowledged desire for the seduction of the image and
at the same time was tempered by a rigorous understanding
of film style, language, technique, and form.
In the pages of Cahiers du cinéma during the 1950s,
Bazin’s realist aesthetics were embraced by François
Truffaut (1932–1984), Eric Rohmer (b. 1920), Jean-
Luc Godard (b. 1930), Jacques Rivette (b. 1928),
Claude Chabrol (b. 1930), and others as a discourse of
film authorship, mise-en-scène, and Hollywood. They
invested themselves in the cinema by means of a highly
personalized style of writing, praising films and directors
that, as Metz puts it, were designated as ‘‘good objects.’’
Other films, such as those of the French cinema, were
derided as poor excuses for filmmaking. The real auteurs
were those who expressed themselves in terms of images.
The Cahiers critics articulated their excessive cinephilia in
phrases such as ‘‘tracking shots are a question of morality’’
to refer to both Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and
the cinema of Sam Fuller (1912–1997) (Hillier, ed.
Cahiers, p. 62). Rossellini’s cinema constituted ‘‘a state
of mind’’ (ibid., p. 203); Nicholas Ray (1911–1979),
according to Godard, ‘‘is morally a director, first and
foremost,’’ ‘‘one cannot but feel that here is something
which exists only in the cinema’’ (ibid., p. 116). Rivette
claimed that ‘‘what justifies CinemaScope in the first
place is our desire for it’’ (ibid., p. 276).
The cinephilia of the Cahiers critics set in motion
some of the key paradigms of film studies scholarship,
including, most crucially, auteurist criticism and the
canon of masterpieces on which the discipline was
founded. While their project was, on one level, to supply
the cinema with a critical vocabulary and pantheon that
would align it with the other arts, it was a project that
also recognized the specificity of the cinema as a commercial
medium. Their embrace of the American cinema,
through the key figures of Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann
(1907–1967), Sam Fuller, and Fritz Lang (1890–
1976)—alongside Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock
(1899–1980)—entailed a reading of Hollywood as a
modernist enterprise. The Cahiers critics were, in many
instances, writing about cinema ‘‘against the grain’’ of its
studio-based generic formulas.
While there is little agreement or consensus within
the film-critical community about what ‘‘cinephilia’’
really means, a recurring theme is the idea of excess.
More specifically, cinephilia may be a kind of excess that
resides on the level of detail, which is ‘‘caught’’ by a
viewer for whom it opens up a subjective relation to the
text. In fact, this notion of cinematic experience can be
linked to a variety of critical discourses and theoretical
frameworks, including some of the theories developed by
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) (the punctum and the
‘‘third meaning’’) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
(‘‘unconscious optics’’ and flânerie). The cinephile in this
sense is the viewer who is slightly distracted from the
filmic text and yet entranced by moments that exceed the
text and take him or her elsewhere.
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
300 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM