After the Revolution: on the Fate of Cinephilia

                
                
by James Morrison
"One cannot live without Rossellini!" --Bertolucci's Before the Revolution
In 1995, the year of cinema's centenary, Susan Sontag published a now well-known essay for the occasion. From the title-"A Century of Cinema"-one might have surmised that the piece was a fond tribute to the quintessential art of the 1900s. Instead, after a breezy recounting of some high points in film history, it turned into a subdued elegy for a medium in decline. (First published in Germany, the essay was subsequently reprinted in the New York Times Magazine under a title that left little room for doubt: "The Decay of Cinema.") Others, elsewhere, were already mourning the death of cinema-and had been, in one way or another, for nearly the whole hundred years of film's existence. What Sontag lamented was the death of cinephilia, and that difference may be what caused her essay to strike a chord the other dirges missed. All the chatter about the death of cinema was somehow predictable, especially at the onset of new digital media that posed direct challenges to the primacy of film, and it had a more generally familiar ring, harking back to now-quaint debates about the death of opera at the end of the nineteenth century, or proclamations concerning the exhaustion of literature in the 1960s. But Sontag was talking about something else. "If cinephilia is dead," she wrote, "then movies are dead . . . no matter how many movies, even very good ones, go on being made." Despite the conditional form of the sentence, it still had the air of a dour, final pronouncement. Especially considering Sontag's enduring cultural authority, it seemed quite official: Something important had waned, was gone, without ever having been properly recognized until after its crucial influence had already passed.
What was cinephilia? It was a particular way of loving movies: eclectic, voracious, attuned to the importance of film as a force in everyday life, impassioned, if a little sentimental, undiscriminating in its pursuit of a new movie high-a form of addiction that hoped never to be sated. The cinephile might have loved and sought great movies, masterpieces, but was fervently committed foremost to an aesthetic of amplitude, of tireless ranginess, that could admit anything-not to demean masterpieces by mixing them up with tripe, but to experience the rush of discovering the masterpiece amid the tripe. Anyone can spot a masterpiece, a Grand Illusion or Earrings of Madame de..., a L'Avventura or Persona, but only a cinéphile could uncover the glories, all the more wondrous for being hidden, of minor, even failed work that might be refashioned, if only by force of will, into greatness of another kind, perhaps even a better kind because of the heady exertions its conversion demanded: an Elena and Her Men or Rise of Louis XIV or The Exile, a Zabriskie Point or The Touch-this last Ingmar Bergman's worst film by far, but an object of potential reverence to those cinéphiles for whom a truly awful movie was almost as good as a really great one, and infinitely preferable to a simply mediocre one. On the other hand, since the ultimate object of the cinephile's love was the image itself, the idea of the image, it may be that there was no such thing as a mediocre movie. For the true cinéphile, books might be mediocre; movies were sublime.
Cinephilia was a form of cultism, an art of seeing in movies what others didn't see-the beauty of form in Hitchcock's Under Capricorn, say, or the tenderness under the surface of some of Bunuel's seemingly cruelest films, the diffuse elegance of Stan Brakhage, the wayward intellect of Otto Preminger. It was itself a form of intellect, though intellectuals from Graham Greene to Jean Epstein to Nicola Chiaromante to Guillermo Cabrera Infante to Roland Barthes to Gilles Deleuze-to, for that matter, Sontag herself-could stand accused of slumming whenever they indulged it. But it was, principally, a commitment to intellect as vehement passion, finding powerful stimulation where those who considered intellect merely a facet of rational cognition would find only tedium. It embraced moments of intensity even in the most banal films (pace Epstein's notion of photogénie), and made of those intensities a private, shared mythology. The cinephile might have commanded an encyclopedic knowledge of film, but it would rarely boast anything like the logical order of an actual encyclopedia, this being intellect of a new order, responding to new needs, and answerable chiefly to the lure of images, not the rule of words. Cinephilia was frequently garrulous, as in such representative samples as the film writing of Vachel Lindsay, Biaise Cendrars, or Manny Farber, or more recently that of David Thomson in the seventies (collected in the books Awake in the Dark and Overexposures), or Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire in 1993, perhaps the last gasp of a certain strain of cultivated cinephilia. But the words poured forth most often as stream-of-consciousness, with the hopeful obstinacy of free association and with a crabby restlessness indicating a keen awareness that even the poetry of certain words could never adequately convey the poetry of any image.
And maybe, come to think of it, it wasn't true that anyone could recognize a masterpiece. After all, the philistines at Cannes booed L'Avventura off the screen in 1960, and it took the cinephiles, with some unexpected help from the critical establishment, to put it back in the canon where it belonged. Part of the history of cinephilia is a history of recovery, a slow process of persuading the general audience, the noncinephiles, of the value of what was overlooked or neglected or scorned. It is, therefore, a history of surpassing masterpieces subject to initial abuse: Dreyer's Gertrud, say, or Hitchcock's Marnie, or the films of John Cassevetes from Shadows to A Woman under the Influence, all works from the heyday of cinephilia. The urge of the cinéphile was to rescue such works, to restore them to the greatness that was proper to them, while also protecting them, keeping them from the grasp of the uncomprehending masses. This was a curator's impulse, but the cinephile's archive was a chaotic one, a vast hodgepodge of titles from many places and times (though mostly America and Europe), and to be admitted you had to leave your ordinary standards of taste at the door, accept the vital and joyous subversion of traditional cultural hierarchies, and suspend normative attitudes of evaluation.
Cinephiles were often literally curators and archivistsHenri Langlois of the French Cineémathèque was the best example, Richard Roud of the New York Film Festival (and Langlois's biographer) another-but at the peak of cinephilia, they were rarely critics, the cabal at Cahiers du cinéma notwithstanding. During the 1960s in the United States, a lively film culture flourished, though largely in the shadow of its European cousins. Not surprisingly, this culture was principally centered in New York, and it would not be inaccurate to call aspects of this marginal renaissance cinephiliac, but this was also the period of the emergence of a quite consolidated bloc in American film criticism, monolithic if not exactly unified, consisting of figures such as Dwight Macdonald, Andrew Sarris, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Pauline Kael, and a few others. Of these only Sarris and Kael leaned toward cinephilia-Sarris in his cultish, neo-auteurist eclecticism, Kael in her brittle but earthy promotion of a pop aesthetic of energetic vulgarity-but like the rest, both remained highly dependent on a notion of traditional standards and nursed biases no true cinéphile would have maintained (against avantgarde cinema, for instance). The rest of these critics upheld a lofty conception of film as art that was really meant to preserve an even loftier realm of art as such. With its monomaniacal drive to uncover and to cherish whatever was most distinctive in film, and to pursue ruthlessly the challenges the new medium posed to old-fashioned ideas about art, cinephilia clearly endangered that very preserve. One of those critics, Stanley Kauffmann, famously designated this age "the film generation"; though Kauffmann celebrated this development in 1966, within a year or two he was anything but wholehearted in his approval of a new youth culture weaned on film and therefore increasingly indifferent, as he saw it, to other arts, to culture itself, to politics, to society. When he later bemoaned the apparent inexorability of this rising tide, so much at odds with what he represented himself, he was talking about cinephilia.
Near the beginning of Bernardo Bertolucci's film The Dreamers-among other things an ode to cinephilia-a lonely young American in the Paris of 1968 haunts the Cinémathèque, lapping up movies, always sitting in the front rows so that, as he says, he can capture the image before anyone else. Near the end, he goes back with a date-a young French woman with whom, together with her brother, he has been having an unruly yet frolicsome menage-a-trois-and they sit in the rear of the auditorium. Only those without dates, he explains, sit in the front. The film unfolds; it's Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, from 1957, a cinephile's delight-and the boy and the girl make out in the dark, oblivious to the pleasures on the screen. Bertolucci keeps his camera close to them, as if that proximity were sufficient to communicate the responsiveness to their youthful passions he clearly means to convey, but he also cuts away restlessly to the film, as if wanting us to pay attention to what they're missing. It is not entirely clear whether Bertolucci expects us to groove on these kids' tempestuous sexuality or to notice how self-absorbed it is, but by putting us in the position of having to choose, as it were, between two kinds of cinematic pleasure-that of the literal sexual content that the movies have always made so richly available, or that of the voluptuary formalisms of an auteur like Tashlin-Bertolucci raises basic questions about the role of eroticism in movie love and, by extension, of sexuality in society.
                
                
Whether cinephiliac or not, anyone watching movies will eventually be placed in the position of voyeur. The sight of people kissing was among the first to be chronicled on filmin Edison's The Kiss in 1896-and it escalated over decades to become a pivotal image of the movies, if not the definitive one, marking tumultuous turning points (in, say, Gone With the Wind or Vertigo], bringing about or securing whole climaxes (in typical romances, or less typical screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby, or in earnest melodramas like Brief Encounter, where the kissing is kept chaste to signify a greater seriousness), and growing more zealous through the years, despite ever-vigilant censors, until being superseded at last by images of actual intercourse, simulated or otherwise. The migration of such images of flagrant carnality from pornography into the more general and putatively respectable sphere of "legitimate" cinema was a transition assisted by directors like Bertolucci himself in the 1960s and 1970s, and it is a history everyone knows, even if it remains in large part a shadow history, like that of cinephilia. What Bertolucci draws attention to in The Dreamers-some thirty years after Last Tango in Paris, an ultimately masochistic gesture in the direction of sexual liberation-is not so much the narcissism inherent in taking movies as a substitute for sex. After all, Bertolucci's whole career suggests that he would happily approve of narcissism if it succeeded as a means to selffulfillment-except that, in his work, it never does. Rather, in a mode of sensual nostalgia that revels in its own simultaneous naïveté and cynicism, Bertolucci lays bare the exclusionary mechanisms of cinematic voyeurism. Watching lovers on the screen, why aren't we constantly aware of our own profound removal from their passions, and how can we go on loving movies when we know how cruelly they leave us out, especially once we have come up against the blunt inevitability of our own participation in the world they can only reflect?
As a cinematic figure, the menage-a-trois addresses itself to the subject of voyeurism quite directly, and Bertolucci's lissome threesome recalls a whole movie history of such trios, particularly those of the French New Wave-Truffaut's Jules and Jim or Godard's Band of Outsiders, to name only two of the most obvious examples. Each of these films implies that the love of movies is an extension of eroticism beyond the dualism of traditional heterosexuality, with its compulsory rituals of coupling. In The Dreamers, the young American, Matthew, sports the undersized blazer and too-tight trousers of a Belmondo wannabe, and he walks with a gangly, off-centered strut that could come of seeing Breathless too many times but remaining unsure whether one isn't really still closer to James Dean after all-or whether, worse yet, there is no viable model on which to fashion oneself. The brother and sister, Théo and Isabelle, are more sophisticated types who start out sniping at each other like the siblings in Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. (The standard English translation of Cocteau's novel gives the title as The Holy Terrors, and the novel by Gilbert Adair on which The Dreamers is based is called The Holy Innocents; Bertolucci's film was released in France under the title Les Innocents. ) Once their mutual contempt is revealed as incestuous desire, however, they settle down into latter-day versions of the doe-eyed and angstridden semi-delinquent and the sagacious but neurotic, leonine temptress-in other words, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jeanne Moreau, seen through a glass, lightly.
What is most suggestive about the three is how unpersuasive they are as figures of counterculture youth circa May '68, how unconvincing, really, they seem called upon to be. Much about the evocation of period atmosphere in the film has an impersonally distilled, semiotic quality-background details and the overall surround presented not so much as a set of actual objects but as a sequence of ready-made signs, a bust of Mao placed here, a book by Susan Sontag or a copy of Cahiers du cinéma strewn there-and the actors appear less as characters than as highly embodied signifiers. Whatever the intent, one effect of this is to indicate a kind of mimetic rupture, prompting awareness that the young people playing these roles, representative as they may be of something in contemporary youth, are simply not very much like the young people who might have watched those movies, chanted those slogans, or joined those protests in the distant time and place the film tries to recapture. This sense of disconnection paradoxically amplifies the movie's nostalgia, suggesting how far past that time now is, and how very distant that place.
Bodies being a principal object of voyeurism, cinematic or otherwise, it is the bodily presence of the three players that Bertolucci keeps returning to, and in the sense that the menage-a-trois enacts or replicates the erotics of spectatorship in the cinema, the director uses it to comment on the voyeuristic gaze he elicits. The film's conceit is to place these three in an opulent apartment as the riots of May '68 roil about them, and to let us watch (or make us watch, as the case may be) their private games of transgression, involving teasing cinematic fantasies and blunt sexual realities that, in turn, can function only as fantasy for the viewer. Bertolucci seems to be asking us to think about the relation of the "personal" to the "political" against the backdrop of the very history that notoriously altered that relation forever. At first playful, if charged with sadism, the kids' games grow more and more hermetic, more and more removed from the social turmoil brewing just outside. A standard take on May '68 is that it gave new credence to notions of cultural politics, forging the link between personal, cultural affiliations or preferences (left or right, black or white, colonial or anti-colonial, male or female, gay or straight, to cite the oppositions most commonly associated with the period) and political action. According to conventional wisdom, this was the decisive moment when a politics based on class gave way to one allied with larger issues of identity, but by the time the three young people in Bertolucci's movie join the riots, their escapades have become so insular, so narcissistic, we can see little connection between their private conflicts and their public protests. Yet Bertolucci does not appear to be slamming the pretensions of the idle rich, exposing the impulse behind the protests as just another version or outcome of bourgeois ennui (like Louis Malle in May Fools). Rather, he seems to be interested in exploring the limits of cultural politics, especially in relation to the cinema as a begetter of private fantasy, a vehicle of identity formation, and a cultural form with real social effects.
In the films of the French New Wave, the ménage à trois was perhaps the most common objective-correlative for what were perhaps the most characteristic themes or moods of the movement: jealousy, envy, resentment (or its more exact French equivalent, ressentiment). Moviegoing itself played a key role in the treatment of these themes, for one of the things that made the New Wave seem so modern, so up to the minute, so casually self-reflexive, was the fact that where characters of previous films rarely went to the movies, the characters in films of the New Wave often did-and often in threes, like the mother, father, and son in The Four Hundred Blows setting off for the cinema in a rare moment of happiness. (That happiness was not just rare but short-lived, since moviegoing in New Wave films often had clear sadomasochistic connotations.) It wasn't just that the ménage à trois was already a movie cliché, one that the characters of these films were as keen to reenact as they were to take on the personae of the film stars they adored, and for much the same reasons of cultural identification. At some level, movies like Jules and Jim and Godard's Pierrot le fou and Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us and Chabrol's La Femme Infidel, all films about triangulated desire, express an awareness that this centrifugal force is basic to the movie-going experience. In the ménage à trois-at least as these films portray it, especially Bertolucci's-one is both participant and watcher; at the movies, as a passive observer, one is always in some fashion the excluded other in a transaction of physical, visual pleasure, the outcast third in a dyadic compact that still teasingly coaxes one's attentions: the pair of lovers gamboling on the screen, or the lone body that solicits the camera itself in a kind of surrogate coupling of which the viewer can only pretend to be part. (Bertolucci makes us aware of this dynamic in The Dreamers by systematically showing each member of the triangle enviously watching the other two in pairs.) The tragic sense of the films of the New Wave has a great deal to do with just this kind of abjection; the movies end in disaster when it becomes clear that the ménage à trois arrangement, far from compensating for the losses of cinematic or everyday voyeurism, merely repeats them, as in Jules and Jim-or more simply, when you realize you'll never really be Bogey, or that life isn't a musical, or that the guns that seem like such nifty trinkets on the screen produce real blood (or at least, pace Godard, quantities of red paint) when used on actual flesh. For all the ambivalent love of movies these films express-until May '68, that is-they are largely engaged in exposing the fantasy life engendered by the movies as sterile and destructive.
                
                
Bertolucci's movies take up many of the same issues, often in more traditionally political terms. His first important film, Before the Revolution, was released in 1964 (when he was twenty-four, a year younger than the Welles of Citizen Kane) only five years after the New Wave had announced itself with such brash confidence. From the start Bertolucci's work was in a pan-European mode closer in style to that of the younger French directors than it was to Bertolucci's fellow Italians. Especially in the work of Fellini or Antonioni, in films like 8'a or L'Avventura, the Italian cinema was in the process of edging over from the neo-realism of the postwar era to a tempered modernism postulated to boost that country's own competing version of a new wave. Bertolucci was very much a part of this transition, but his films of the sixties ally themselves to the more anarchic and roguish spirit of the French New Wave-so much so that he became virtually an honorary member of that movement.
For the first decade of his career Bertolucci's work seems split between an allegiance to radical political critique under the influence of Godard, and a lushness of style-inimical to Godard's early work-that constantly threatens to undermine the films' avowed ideologies. The tension is reflected as early as the first sequence of Before the Revolution, in which a character is comically torn between going to a screening of Howard Hawks's Red River or joining the Communist Party. This conflict between a luxuriant sensuality, often tied to love of cinema, and the implicit demand for a rigorously progressive politics finds an analogue in the subjects of Bertolucci's films, which tend to concern passive, callow characters forced to choose between opposing ways of life or political allegiances, a schism typically framed as a clash between sexuality and social responsibility. In The Conformist Bertolucci follows a long line of popular representation in implying a causal link between homosexuality and fascism: Seduced by the family chauffeur as a young boy, the film's main character dubiously commits to fascism as a man, recalling his childhood trauma as an underlying source of this allegiance. Though the film associates homosexuality with apolitical decadence, it revels in a style with clear associations to high-camp aesthetics. The Dreamers all but eliminates the explicit homosexual content of the novel on which it is based, but it too thrives on a free-floating homoeroticism.
While the sexual politics of Bertolucci's films remain deeply ambiguous, they often concern, as in Before the Revolution, the confrontation of erotic fantasy with a reality principle typically construed as politics itself. To the extent that cinephilia contains a crucial ingredient of erotic fantasy, it becomes a suggestive vehicle of that theme in both Before the Revolution and The Dreamers. Bertolucci's constant recurrence to the notion of sex as social emancipation suggests that he takes that idea with some degree of seriousness, even if it never succeeds as a possibility in his work. For Godard, for whom sex is associated with bourgeois individualism, such an idea would be anathema; for Truffaut, for whom sex is old-fashioned romance, it would be irrelevant, romance having a way of working itself out in his films as comedy, tragedy, or farce in a process impervious to social agendas. In that sense Bertolucci is the best equipped of the three to deal with the sociocultural implications of the erotics of cinephilia, even if his perennial recourse to sexuality as theme always remains willfully unresolved.
In The Dreamers, sex and cinephilia are aligned as dimensions of the personal with potentially liberating social effects. With its implication of naïve idealism, the title of the film alone points to the failure of this potential, and the mode of the film's nostalgia for the period it evokes is a kind of gingerly but affectionate elegy, rife with circumspect, and retrospective, awareness of just what the youthful exuberance of its characters, and their high hopes for the future, came to so quickly. The long, mournful last shot of the film portrays the very beginning of this cultural revolution as foredoomed, and the film is animated by the contradictory energies that infuse Bertolucci's work as a whole. The filmmaker is avidly attracted to these characters' attitudes even though the whole point of the film is to exhibit their limitations; he deeply wants cinephilia to liberate the sensibility and sex to free the body, but he knows now that they can't. Perhaps he always knew it: the heady blend of romanticism and self-conscious skepticism in his work was already present in Before the Revolution, in the main character's diagnosis of himself as afflicted with "nostalgia for the present" (a phrase later appropriated by Fredric Jameson and others to define aspects of the postmodern condition). What he means-and what the film in its fierce extravagance portrays-is that his desire to capture reality, to make direct and powerful contact with contemporary experience, is so fervent that it becomes a form of blockage. It's a lesson Bertolucci has certainly embraced by now as a matter of course-that the most feverish desire becomes an end in itself, and renders its objects insignificant-and the reversionary nostalgia of The Dreamers is of the old-fashioned kind, for a past longed for because it was delectably imperfect, and is now irretrievably gone.
Cinephilia itself, of course, was a form of desire; as Bertolucci's film makes clear, it was very nearly libidinal in the vivacity of its appetites, which were intensified all the more by the open recognition of its objects as pure phantasm. In The Dreamers, the movies are seen as a sphere of public fantasy that lends itself to private reverie and appropriation, and the characters in the film co-opt movies fanatically, successively, for purposes of alliance, coalition, contention, identification, variance, self-fashioning. They think of movies not as displaced eroticism but as actual sex, masturbatory yet orgiastic, and they act out their favorite scenes to integrate the movies into their daily lives as ritual, forging a cult of movie history-so passionately that it rises above mere trivia-which they use to test others' worth, and their own. Bertolucci's mitigated critique of their movie love differs from Godard's hectoring bedevilment of his characters' oblivious role-modeling. When Belmondo fashioned himself on Bogart in Breathless, to take the most obvious example, what we were supposed to see was the scarifying ease with which mass culture impresses itself on abject and unstable personalities, and the dangers of this potential. Though largely figments of the director's own cinephilia, Godard's characters are not, for the most part, cinéphiles; Bertolucci's are, but they hunger for the movies not with the unthinking reflexiveness of Godard's lively ciphers, but with the impetuous self-reflexivity of a band of post-structuralists avant la lettre. They never doubt that their cinephilia is a form of political commitment-and that, for Bertolucci, may be just the problem.
May '68 put a decisive end to the tide of cinephilia that produced the French New Wave. For the critics who became the filmmakers of that movement-Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette-it had been an article of faith in the era after World War II that movies served as a legitimate vehicle for the revival of a viable cultural politics seeking restitution from the bourgeois status quo. Their espousal of the politique des auteurs was, among other things, a manner of projecting the values of their own modernism onto redemptive elements of the establishmentarian mass culture of Hollywood. In its European form the auteur theory was founded not on reverence for Hollywood but on contempt for it. The small handful of auteurs who flourished within the Hollywood system were celebrated for keeping alive a spirit of implicitly modernist resistance to the degraded commercialism and global imperialism of American cinema, and for the auteurists this resistance was all the more compelling insofar as it took place in the very midst of Hollywood.
                
                
It was in this light that these critics glorified the existentialist disillusionment of film noir, the quasi-modernist self-consciousness of a Hitchcock or Welles, the irascible brutalism of a Sam Fuller, the embittered social critique of a Nicholas Ray or Douglas Sirk, even the diffident myth-making of a Raoul Walsh or John Ford. And it was in this same spirit that these critics continued to pay homage to their idols once they began to make their own films. In the case of Godard alone, his first feature (Breathless) was dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a minor Hollywood studio known for producing primitivist B movies; another, Contempt, vents just that against the crassness of Hollywood filmmaking while honoring the Hollywood films of Fritz Lang, who appears in the movie as a chimerical misanthrope; Sam Fuller turns up in Pierrot le fou, a film that seems modeled in part on Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night; and virtually all of Godard's films of the 1960s are brazen composites of Hollywood genres, rendered with derelict satire. Like many of the other filmmakers of the movement, Godard reveled in a makeshift freedom that enabled him to pursue the modernist project of the great auteurs to its logical conclusion; at times it seemed as if he were making the movies he thought the auteurs would have made, had they not been beholden to the constraints of the Hollywood system.
As The Dreamers chronicles, an inaugural line of protest in May '68 was precipitated by the firing of Langlois from his post as director of the French Cinémathèque. Bertolucci's film begins with footage of key figures of the New Wave objecting angrily to his dismissal, and the movie expresses a certain wistful awe that there should ever have been a time when film culture seemed so directly connected to the politics of culture more generally. As the movie also shows, that time was very near its end. Once the protests escalated to enraged dissent against the onset of neo-colonialism in Vietnam, the stakes must have seemed raised to a degree that made earlier notions of the contiguity of film culture and cultural politics seem to have been a complacent, naïve, and ineffectual delusion. After all, Langlois was reinstated to his post, while the interventions in Vietnam increased exponentially. How close a connection could there really have been between such events, if one ended in a pyrrhic victory and the other in a defeat so ignominious as to appear apocalyptic?
Godard, for one, after May '68, promptly repudiated any lingering allegiance to Hollywood on the grounds that it could only be seen, from that point, as an arm of the American power machine. By then, the great auteurs were mostly specters of the past anyway-finished off in part, ironically, by the modernizing novelties of the New Wave that had rendered their work hopelessly rearguard-but what could their resistance have amounted to, in any case, if it had failed to fend off this disastrous expansion of American empire? seemingly overnight Godard's artistic practice became overtly politicized in a new way, now looking back not to the bourgeois commonwealth of Hollywood but to precedents of Communist cinema, especially in the Soviet film of the 1920s. Forging a new mode of guerilla filmmaking, Godard by the early 1970s had formed a collective called the Dziga Vertov Group in honor of the Russian director of Man with a Movie Camera, and in some of his subsequent films (notably Letter to Jane or sections of the video series Histoire(s) du cinéma) the now-demoted auteurs are portrayed, however lovingly or regretfully, as having been little more than dupes of a dominant ideology.
In the year following May '68 Godard denounced Bertolucci, his former disciple, for accepting money from a Hollywood studio to make The Conformist. He broke with Truffaut after delivering a scathing response to the latter's 1973 film Day for Night (titled in French with only half-hearted irony La Nuit Américain). Godard's lacerating indictment was built on the charge that Truffaut's whimsical comedy about the movie industry failed to expose the fraudulent mechanisms of filmmaking tout court, and especially Hollywood filmmaking:
Probably no one else will call you a liar, so I will. It's no more an insult than "fascist," it's a criticism, and it's the absence of criticism that I complain of in the films of Chabrol, Ferreri, Verneuil, Delannoy, Renoir, etc. You say: films are trains that pass in the night, but who takes the train, in what class, and who is driving it with an "informer" from the management standing at his side?
Truffaut replied furiously, at great length, in a letter that occupies seven tall octavo pages of his published correspondence, a blistering excoriation that stands as a bitter epitaph for the French New Wave. He begins by calling his former comrade "a piece of shit on a pedestal," and goes on to chastise Godard for his own claims to political virtue:
Between your interest in the masses and your own narcissism there's no room for anything or anyone else. After all, those who called you a genius, no matter what you did, all belonged to that famous trendy Left that runs the gamut from Susan Sontag to Bertolucci via Richard Roud... and even if you sought to appear impervious to flattery... you fostered the myth.
Throughout the sixties, the cinephiles of the New Wave may have loved the mythologies of movies as the expression of a hoped-for post-industrial romanticism, but from the start, they all hated the damaging political implications and real social consequences of those same mythologies. This contradiction was basic to the complexity of their responses to American movies, always inflected in nearly equal parts by love and hate, and the films of the movement committed themselves to debunking these mythologies as a practice of activism in the realm of cultural politics. Once that impulse to progressive iconoclasm devolved into just another kind of myth-making, as Truffaut suggests, there was no further to go. It was the end not just of the movement itself, but of the cinephilia that had bred and long supported it.
                
                
Bertolucci made Last Tango in Paris four years after May '68 as if officially to mark the end of the New Wave. In its use of an American star (Marion Brando) as an index of cultural sensibility, the film points back to the earliest tendencies of the movement (quite specifically, to the casting of Jean Seberg in Breathless). Yet the film combines a melancholy, elegiac mood with open derision of certain New Wave attitudes embodied in the figure of Jean-Pierre Léaud, cast for his associations with the movement and treated with tart satire-as if Bertolucci had come to praise the movement and to bury it.
In both The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci broached a new internationalism of a type that was fairly incidental to the main currents of the movement, seen chiefly in such distinguished yet marginal items as Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort, or Chabrol's The Champagne Murders; for all its cosmopolitanism, and its errant trafficking with Hollywood, the New Wave remained a home-grown venture and a strikingly nationalist enterprise. Pursuing this ascendant internationalism incomparably further than the New Wave ever did, Bertolucci's subsequent career is far more representative than Truffaut's or Godard's of the next wave of the European artfilm-in its abandonment of the quest for a viable political critique as well as in its intemperate and often exoticist bordercrossings. Bertolucci's work of the following decades encompasses the terrains of Asia (in The Last Emperor), South Asia (in Little Buddha), Africa (in Little Buddha and Besieged), North Africa and the Middle East (in The Sheltering Sky).
Recent efforts to revive cinephilia, or to bring its enduring presence to light, have similarly appealed to a new globalism in film culture as a source of inspiration. The cinephiles of The Dreamers look back to a now-familiar canon, split between the films of Hollywood auteurs (Scarface, Blonde Venus, Queen Christina, among others) and a handful of duly enshrined art films, particularly those of Godard (Breathless and Band of Outsiders). Especially from the vantage point of the present, what's most striking about this pantheon is its decidedly Euro-American bias; even its dual tracks reveal this mutual implication, the Hollywood films often bearing clear European associations (Scarface as proto-noir, Blonde Venus and Queen Christina directed by Europeans, Von Sternberg and Mamoulian) and the European ones showing Hollywood ties (via the influence of the American gangster film on Godard's movies). After the New Wave, French cinephilia turned toward an ascetic severity, represented by the devout high theory of Cahiers du cinema in the seventies; though these reconstructed cinephiles were as apt to scorn Hollywood as to celebrate it (see the Cahiers editors' essay on Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, widely reprinted), they operated from much the same canon. As represented in film, American cinephilia of the seventies, only a pallid specter of that of the previous decade, migrated to the New Hollywood, which harked back to the New Wave in making its characters' film-watching habits a going concern. In that vein cinephilia functions to entomb a few dusty old Hollywood classics in the pale tributes of movies like The Last Picture Show or Mean Streets. In its slightly more sophisticated versions, as in movies by Paul Mazursky or Woody Alien (growing out of a revived New York film culture surrounding the Bleecker Street Cinema and other independent art-houses), this cinephilia is still chiefly concerned with defining a canon that bridges a divide between "high" and "low" tastes. In Alien's films of the late seventies, such as Annie Hall or Manhattan, the pantheon runs from Ingmar Bergman and The Sorrow and the Pity to Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields-leaving the Euro-American axis squarely in place.
                
                
In the recently published volume Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, Eds.; London: British Film Institute, 2003), a collective of contemporary critics and self-defined cinephiles attempt to track the evolution of cinephilia over the past decade or so. They conclude that the situation of the formerly most powerful centers of production is dire indeed, but far from sounding the death knell, they find that this circumstance points to new directions in the development of film. In their view, cinephilia remains consolidated around ongoing projects of rediscovery and the constitution of an alternative canon that reflects an emerging (or already arrived) "world" cinema. This pantheon includes, among others, a few holdovers from the New Wave and after, never quite given their due-Jacques Rivette, Jean Eustache, Chantai Akerman; a small number of contemporary Europeans, like the Hungarian BeIa Tarr or the Portuguese Manoel de Oliveira; a few directors from Latin America, like the Chilean-born Raul Ruiz; and a large number of filmmakers from Asia and South Asia, including Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi (from Iran), Wong Kar-wai (from Hong Kong), Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien (from Taiwan), and Yasuzo Masumura (from Japan).
Heartening as the greater pluralism of this list may be, the new cinephilia still conducts itself in a manner much in keeping with the old cinephilia. In large part, its project remains to discern the work of individual "masters" (a category that remains very male)-only now they're Abel Ferrara and Olivier Assayas instead of Sam Fuller and Jean-Pierre Melville. What's more, the value of the work most admired is typically attributable to the extent to which it echoes the past products of a mainline auteurism, reverberations detected in the unlikeliest places. Panahi's The Circle (2000), for example, may be an incisive account of the politics of gender in contemporary Iran, but according to Jonathan Rosenbaum (among the key film critics of our time and an editor of Movie Mutations), one of its salient features is its resemblance to "a punchy Warners proletarian-protest quickie of the '3Os." Masumura's work is treated over four lengthy sections of the book, meanwhile, less for its cultural specificity in a Japanese context than for its extensive parallels to the films of Howard Hawks.
As noted earlier, the cinephiles of the New Wave were sometimes accused of projecting their own cultural biases toward a modified Euro-modernism onto a very different sociocultural context, that of Hollywood, which they insufficiently understood-how else explain their love of Jerry Lewis, went the programmatic complaint. Despite the global range of reference one finds in Movie Mutations, it is difficult to escape the impression that the real cultural differences it encompasses collapse, in the end, into a rather cozy universalism. This impression is fostered, for instance, when the Iranian master Kiarostami mouths ancient clichés about film as "a universal language," though he above all should be cognizant of the stifling homogeneity such pieties have frequently generated when they've been put into practice.
What the new cinephiles have most in common with the old cinephiles, in fact, is their status as a quite delimited interpretive community, in which shared tastes and collective references define the terms of the discourse. Movie Mutations consists largely of exchanges of e-mails and letters conveying the correspondents' sense of themselves as an international cabal-they use the word themselves-and the "personal" nature of these interactions is redolent of a self-styled movement in the making: They refer to one another, affectionately, as "the mutants." They represent a range of countries-the United States (Rosenbaum), Australia (Adrian Martin), Canada (Mark Peranson), France (Nicole Brenez), and even Argentina (Edouardo Antin), but though they are, of course, incomparably more international as a group than the Cahiers du cinema writers and New Wave directors, they still reflect among their number very little of the diversity of the multinational cinema they so admirably promote. To their credit, the contributors note this very aspect of their enterprise in a long concluding dialogue, but it is still worth asking to what extent this new cinephilia recasts its newly global pantheon in the vestigial terms of a lingering Euro-modernist auteurism.
Perhaps most striking about Movie Mutations is the commitment to intellectual rigor it sustains, at least rhetorically, even at its most personal. (In this these writers look back to the attitudes of seventies' Cahiers du cinéma or Screen more than to the French cinephilia of the fifties or sixties.) The reconciliation these writers seek with the academy, for instance, despite their frequent hostility to it, may be what most palpably distinguishes this new cinephilia, because it is so much at odds with the belligerent intellectual rebelliousness of the New Wave cinephiles. The contributors to Movie Mutations speak from time to time of a longing for "a cinema of the body," but they seem to be referring to the body as a figural presence rather than a carnal object. Though the work of the new masters they enshrine may be highly sensory in technical terms, with lovely visual textures and beautifully layered sound designs, its most typical samples are characterized by some form of asceticism, often an extreme one-as in the cases of de Oliveira or Kiarostami. In their advancement of cinema as cross-cultural communication, the lingua franca of the global age, these writers also turn away from the model of cinephilia as proprietary desire. By contrast to that ardent impulse of the earlier generation, these writers love the movies they love not so much because they apprehend them as somehow immediately theirs, but because they open up some access to spaces of "otherness" which might thereby, in a sense, be duly repatriated.
                
                
For these reasons, and despite the parallels, the new cinephilia-if that's really what it is-is of a very different kind from its earlier counterparts. In fact, it is not really proper to speak, as above, of "longing" on the part of these writers, for they appear to have repudiated a model of cinephilia as yearning intoxication, desirous and driven by appetites. Especially by comparison to their predecessors, they espouse a love of movies that is meticulous and sober-a cinephilia for grown-ups. Theirs is a cinephilia that is, in its way, posi-voyeuristic, therefore blessedly free of the boorishness that often emerged from the hothouse boys' club of the New Wave. It no longer upholds the cinema as a simmering cauldron from which new identities might be promiscuously culled, even if it still cherishes the hope that film might have something urgent to do with the politics of culture, might even intervene crucially in the world's shifting geopolitical order. If Bertolucci's film memorializes cinephilia as a manifestation of youth that must be put aside in the onset of a longed-for but impossible maturity, then the cinephilia of Movie Mutations may be the best realization of what can remain in that wake. A cinephile of the old school with affinities for the new dispensation, Peter Wollen recently defined cinephilia as "a symptom of a desire to remain within a child's view of the world, always outside." For better or worse, adulthood may be where cinephilia goes when it does not die.
But if cinephilia is dead, it may be because finally, in an odd way, it triumphed. What is left of film culture in the United States, after all, bears the legacy of a free-wheeling, filmgeneration-style cinephilia, not the influence of Stanley Kauffmann's wary, cautionary cavils. Though even his moment seems already to have passed, Quentin Tarantino-with his convulsive referentiality, his passive-aggressive framing of stylized sex and violence as the essence of movie love-is the quintessential director of a debased cinephilia, the ultimate video-store auteur. Young audiences don't typically get the references, but they know they're there, so the allusions function as a gauge of the movies' hipness. Like so much on the recent film scene, Tarantino's movies are designed for audiences wanting to be flattered for their knowingness, and DVDs decked out with directors' commentaries and a host of "special features" similarly appeal to a consumerist desire to knowand the kids in The Dreamers, in their basic mannerisms and emotional styles, seem like the products of this atmosphere of self-satisfied knowingness more than they ever do of the culture of May '68. Cinephilia may have craved knowledge of the beloved, but this longing was, in part, conditioned on the unattainability of its object, an elusiveness that was what gave movies some of their mystic allure.
The proliferation in the last decades of so many new media through which films may be channeled-cable or satellite TV, the ceaseless diorama of the Internet, the winking Maxwell's Demon of the TiVo, ungainly cassettes or lithe, shimmering discs-would seem to have realized all the cinephile's proprietary dreams, but in fact it puts an end to fantasies of film as a dimension of nymphean love, and maybe for that reason to cinephilia itself. To the extent that these new media make more movies more available to more people than ever before, they surely foment cinephilia on a mass scale; but to the extent that they function to process and package movies, they are just another stage in the advanced commodity fetishism of the digital era. The age of mechanical reproduction was supposed to have already robbed art of its aura, but it took these new avenues of access, diminishing that faint nimbus to the vanishing point once and for all, to prove how much there had really been still to be stripped away. Converting the obsession with movies into a worldwide racket, a network of global trade, they reduced the cultism of cinephilia to a plebeian ware in a multinational marketplace. It is clear in retrospect that the aura of movies was exactly what cinephiles had cherished, and though their love was certainly a form of fetishism, what they wanted was to possess the movies-not to own them.