“It makes what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me cease reaching what I cannot attain. And that which I cannot take, I must take up again, never to let go.” The French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, speaking of fascination, but might he be describing cinephilia?
I write about and reflect on cinema and cinephilia. I make video essays which stand at the intersection between academic film studies, film criticism, and fandom. The inspiration for this blog was Jean-Luc Godard’s review of Forty Guns (1957) in which he quotes three “striking” scenes “so rich in invention and so bursting with daring conceptions.” These are quoted without any context, just an impressionistic account of three privileged moments from a film. The older I get, the more I realise that my cinephilia is precisely these kinds of moments which I’m attracted to in a movie and which excite me, pierce me, and stay with me, rather than the whole thing. Of course, not every film has three striking scenes, some may have more, many will have less, but together they reveal my affective, exhilarating, and sometimes troubling relationship with cinema. The film theorist Paul Willemen argues that such striking scenes, when encountered in a film, “spark something which then produces the energy and desire to write, to find formulations to convey something about the intensity of that spark,” enacting a moment of revelation akin to having to dig the person next to you “in the ribs with your elbow to alert them to the fact that you’ve just had a cinephiliac moment.” This blog, then, is that metaphorical dig of the elbow into the ribs.