Context, purpose, and outline of project

In his essay “Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered,” Paul Willemen “identifies cinephilic pleasures as ‘something to do with what you perceive to be the privileged, pleasure-giving, fascinating moment of a relationship to what’s happening on screen’, a fetishising of fleeting details as opposed to examining the film as a whole.”

(from Jason Sperb and Scott Balcerzak’s “Introduction: Presence of Pleasure” in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture, Vol. 1 p. 15)

The Pleasure Project is overseen by a group of film studies students (under the guise of Team Noir) who seek to explore the relationship between cinephilia and theory. If cinephilia is by definition a condition characterized by intense love for the cinema (suffix -philia Greek for friendly feeling toward or abnormal appetite or liking for), then where does film theory fit in? Does theoretical engagement impede pleasure or enhance it? Or does this knowledge encourage a different kind of pleasure (indeed, even inciting pleasure where none had existed before)?

Paul Willemen’s definition of the cinephilic’s “privileged, pleasure-giving, fascinating moment of a relationship to what’s happening on screen” is by no means a definitive rule or formula that can be used to locate the cinema-lover. This form of cinephilia is more of a starting point, a catalyst, to get people talking. If someone does not experience pleasure this way (through an either literal or mental replay of a particular moment in a film), then maybe he or she experiences it another way. Perhaps pleasure lies elsewhere: beyond fetishizing or passive viewing.

The interviews featured in this blog seek an elaboration on a defining cinephilic moment (as defined by the Willemen quote)

Monday, April 2, 2012

Luca Caminati

I am not a cinephile

“Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demand will overshoot its target.” – Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility"









Professor Caminati claims he is not a cinephile and, most importantly, not a fetishist bringing to question whether fetishism is to be considered a necessary component of contemporary cinephilia. Prior to videotape cinema, unlike literature, faced restricted and limited availability causing the inevitable anticipation and fetishization of the moment one would finally have the chance to attend a film screening. Today, the majority of films are widely available in digital form, and the fetishistic aspect of cinephilia has become more concerned with issues of specificity, such as viewing conditions, that may be argued to have little to do with the work itself: the cinephile-fetishist knows a film can be ‘seen’, the question becomes how and where.

Caminati’s willingness to embrace the immediate future of cinema attests to the increased exposure of moving images and his claim that “cinema has won all the battles” rings with a unique romanticism severed from nostalgia. As such, Caminati is not a cinephile in the most typically recognized or traditional sense and his recognition of cinema within the cultural framework of television, advertisements and digital media attests to this. Effectively, such representations of cinema expand beyond the film theatre and have become an immediately recognizable structure within the architecture of the everyday experience. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, Walter Benjamin states that “the human need for shelter is permanent. Architecture has never had fallow periods and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to account for the relationship of the masses to the work of art”. Today, cinema in some form must be recognized as an architectural element that, in many cases, eclipses the presence of buildings themselves such as a commercial ‘screened’ on the side of a large building. Perhaps a particular form of film spectatorship may be lost, but the visual language developed by the film camera continues to demonstrate and develop its cultural value virtually everywhere.

Thinking critically about cinema is no longer an event that takes inside the film theatre or while reading film theory or criticism – it has become a constant task that seems to ‘pop up’ while walking down the street or with the sudden presence of an Iphone.




http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6981

Caminati mentions Edgar Reitz’s Heimat II (1992) in his interview. In the linked article, Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews the German series attributing its value to its length and uncanny ability to cause the viewer’s life to be “significantly disrupted — even unhinged — by the process of taking it all in”. Effectively, Rosenbaum’s article, in referencing Heimat II, brings forth certain capabilities the moving image may realize when freed of the restrictions of the feature-length format.

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