cinephilia

Reading Response: Elsaesser Cinephilia

Elsaesser explores several different definitions of cinephilia. The broadest and most applicable definition for cinephilia was “deferral: a detour in place and space, a shift in register and a delay in time” (30). His example includes how, when and why films are watched- detours of city, language, and location. He also talks about detours of time. The first kind is “Oedipal time: the kind of temporal succession that joins and separates paternity and generational repetition in difference” (31). Considering that our other reading for this week was Laura Mulvey, I found Elsaesser’s recourse to psychoanalytic and masculine based film time an interesting choice. But I think it’s a very valid point about how cinephilia clusters around auteur, the fathers of cinema, and sets up (male) directors as the forbears of cinematic tradition. The second discourse was a “lover’s discourse” which structured desire through cinema, also coinciding rather well with Mulvey’s past and current work. Hmm…the father and desire in film? Who would’ve thought? Elsaesser makes this connection directly when he talks about how the love of cinema turned into a shamed gaze when Mulvey dissected cinephilia into voyeurism, fetishism and scopophilia (32). “Naming here is shaming,” Elsaesser writes. “Cinephilia had been dragged out of its closet, the darkened womblike auditorium, and revealed itself as a source of disappointment: the magic of the movies, in the cold light of day, had become a manipulation of regressive fantasies and the place of the big male escape from sexual difference” (32).

Elsaesser then goes on to explain how disenchantment is a useful way to restructure cinephilia. Disenchantment offers distance and self-consciousness: “it is a form of individuation because it rescues the spectator’s sense of self from being engulfed by the totalizing repleteness, the self-sufficiency and always already complete there-ness that especially classic American cinema tries to convey” (33). The spectator becomes more critical as she gains awareness of her own place in the theater, her implication in all the gazes of the viewing space. This also corresponds to Mulvey’s article which tries to negotiate different temporalities- the here, the now-ness, the then. The cinephiliac is on a never-ending quest to find the best films, but the best films are always in the past, wrapped up in nostalgia and memory. Elsaesser’s metaphor of “cinephilia-as-unrequited love” addresses the bittersweet feeling of the cinephiliac, who knows even as she is watching the ultimate film of films that it will soon be over and nothing can ever recreate that same first time feeling- and that the film does not answer back to the viewer, that it is there to be worshipped in the darkened theater.

The next step after disenchantment is the “post” stage of post-auteur, post-theory cinephilia that embraces new media and involves “re-mastering, re-purposing, and re-framing” (36). This leads into sticky issues of fan power, re-readings, fancy new boxes, etc. Elsaesser compares stage one to “trepidation in anticipation” and stage two “stressed/distressed.” Take two cinephilia is “a search for lost time, and thus the acknowledgement that the singular moment stands under the regime of repetition, of the re-take, of the iterative, the compulsively serial, the fetishistic, the fragmented and the fractal” (39). This reminds me of Mulvey’s search in the freeze frame for the secret, hidden, ignored image that somehow reveals the uncanny deadness of the entire film- its actual existence of separate frames on film stock that disappears with new digital media.