The Cultivation Of Cinephilia In Film

The Cultivation of Cinephilia
Introduction
Cinephilia is excess, detail, a justification for our taste, a hyper-sensitivity to everything transmitted between our body and the cinema, an intense desire for immersion and oneness in and with a moment or image, participation, activism, an education and an educator. The love for cinema, as cinephilia is commonly perceived, has come to acquire several layers of additional meaning rendering it an open-ended, somewhat vague vessel designed to carry, in any which way, the meaning appropriated to it. Thus, it is the idea of this paper that cinephilia, far from dead or decaying, has merely evolved from the place of its birth and grown up to be a truly global mode of thinking and being. This paper will

Sontag spoke of picking up tips on how to dress (Sontag, 1996) from the movies while cinephiliac filmmakers learned how to become film critics (Godard) or even learn how to write narratives and make films as a result of their intense and intimate relationship with the cinema. Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson are good examples of using contemporary cinephilia as a pedagogical tool, with Anderson explaining, My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges' audio track on the 'Bad Day at Black Rock' laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school. Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it.

As two commentators give a sickeningly joyous and cavalier play by play of how Cronenberg will annihilate himself and the last film house standing, we are moved to reflect on the ‘loss’ of cinephilia and the generation which spearheaded it, of which Cronenberg sees himself as the last member. In its place, ‘something better’ has come -- a youth culture lacking sufficient nostalgia and respect for the past. As a generation or two younger than Cronenberg, I can empathize with his paradigm of cinephilia but I do not sympathize with it. I do not see the death of the film house, but the extension of it in the form of online providers such as MUBI. I do not carry a sappy, nostalgic view of film history and cinephilia because I respect it enough to put it to use and draw experience from it as a body of knowledge. Cinephilia is layer upon layer of personal relationship and experience with film, an accumulation of a life spent in service of a love that never