Announcement: The Crisis of Cinephilia

A VoC Monograph.

Dear friends,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I will begin publishing a new monograph, The Crisis of Cinephilia, in twelve chapters beginning Friday May 5. Posting frequency will vary, but the goal is to post at least every two weeks.

Is cinephilia - the love of cinema - a disposition or activity which leads to true happiness? Is the lifelong quest of the cinephile, beset with decisions and desires, destined to end in fruitful fulfilment?

Or is it a Sisyphean mirage forever receding out of reach? Is cinephilia a fundamentally anxious pursuit which knows no rest?

What does it mean when an activity so rooted in involuntary passion seems to inevitably end in absurdity?

How do we reconcile the desires and experiences of the cinephile - a fundamentally modern creature - with ancient and universal aspects of human nature?

Are the actions of a cinephile answerable to a certain normative standard of cinephilia? Is cinephilic identity entirely self-determined or does it flow from a higher ideal?

Can the terms cinephilia and cinephile be defined objectively? Do they even have essential meaning? Or are they doomed to be patently unknowable, because “love is personal” and thus untheorizable?

The Crisis of Cinephilia is a critical odyssey into these and other perennial questions about how to locate the roots of cinephilia as a human phenomenon. Beginning from a personal account of frustrated and anxious cinephilia, we will embark on a search for the conditions necessary to begin theorizing the existence of cinephilia.

Here’s a look at where we are going:

Table of Contents:

Part I: The Crisis of the Cinephile

• 1. The Crisis of the Cinephile

• 2. Cinephilia and Etymology

• 3. A Natural History of the Cinephile: 1920 - 2020

• 4a. A History of Cinephilia as a Concept - Part 1: The Rise and Fall of Classical Cinephilia

• 4b. A History of Cinephilia as a Concept - Part 2: The Rise and Fall of New Cinephilia

• 5. Intermezzo: Cinephilia After History

Part II: The Crisis of Cinephilia

• 6. The Crisis of Cinephilia

• 7. The Crisis of Time

• 8. The Crisis of Authority

• 9. The Crisis of Usefulness

• 10. The Crisis of Being

• 11. Cinephilia and Anxiety

• 12. Cinephilia and Theoria

Part I: The Crisis of the Cinephile sets the stage with a personal crisis of cinephilia: in an age of unprecedented access to films, why is it that my cinephilia seems more anxious and dysfunctional than ever before? What does it even mean to be a cinephile? From there, we will explore the etymological, material, and conceptual history of the cinephile. Here we will collect, as best we can, the existing corpus of theory on cinephilia and begin to assess what it has to tell us about the personal crisis of the cinephile.

With our historical background in place, Part II: The Crisis of Cinephilia will attempt a critical analysis of that corpus by identifying and explaining four crises which bubble up again and again in the history and theory of cinephilia. In understanding these apparently inescapable tensions, we will begin to approach the question of what cinephilia is with fresh eyes, and in doing so, suggest a new way forward for theorizing the ‘love of cinema’ as a properly personal endeavour.

All posts will remain free until the entire series has been completed. Once we are up and running, I will post a more detailed update about paid subscriptions (which are currently disabled) and what to expect with this Substack moving forward.

As with all beginnings, and having learned much about my own weaknesses since launching this Substack, I have more than a bit of trepidation about how this is going to unfold. That said, I think it is the right time to push off into the deep. I have been carrying this project around for close to three years. It is time to cast it firmly but lovingly into the world, however flawed and incomplete this version will be.

With gratitude to St. Joseph the Worker, whose feast is celebrated today and under whose patronage rests this project and all efforts of this Substack.

See you soon,

Nathan

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Image: Plaster model for Fountain with Kneeling Youths, George Minne, 1898. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. Photo by Hugo Maertens. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0