Unsettled Spectatorship:On Anxiety and the Elusive Love of Cinema Kenneth Berger (bio) ANXIOUS CINEPHILIA: PLEASURE AND PERIL AT THE MOVIES BY Sarah Keller New York: Columbia University Press, 2020 In her 1995 essay "The Decay of Cinema," Susan Sontag famously declares the end not of cinema but of cinephilia. Without cinephilia, without a committed love of cinema as a "distinctively" and "quintessentially modern" art form, the future of cinema itself is cast in doubt. And cinephilia, Sontag asserts, is dead. At the root of the problem, Sontag writes, is both the growth of home-viewing technologies (VHS tapes, DVDs, etc.) and the film industry's increasing dependence on Hollywood blockbusters, which together spell an inevitable degradation not only of cinematic quality but of meaningful cinematic experience as well. Although Sontag ends the essay on a seemingly optimistic note, with a call for reinventing "cine-love" as the means to "resurrect" a dying cinema, her larger argument is clear: the mode of experience defined as cinephilia can no longer be sustained, and this is an unmistakable symptom of a culture in decline. In this way, Sontag's argument both reflects and extends the traditional view of cinephilia. Yet "The Decay of Cinema" also marks the moment in which this view starts to be challenged. Indeed, since its publication, Sontag's essay has been an important reference point for film scholars invested in revising—and reviving—cinephilia, in imagining a new and inclusive cinephilia that rejects the elitism expressed [End Page 195] in Sontag's argument and that allows for a more expansive understanding of cinephilia, one relevant to the shifting terrain of our present cultural moment. It is in this context that Sarah Keller's new book, Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, enters the picture. Offering a lucid recounting of the recent debates around cinephilia, as well as a compelling elaboration on those debates, Keller reconsiders cinephilia in broad terms, proposing a widened historical view of how we might comprehend and thus reconceptualize the love of cinema. As the book's title makes clear, however, Keller is concerned not only with the pleasures associated with cinephilia but also with the forms of distress it engenders. Just as love invariably involves a complex mixture of emotions—excitement, attachment, worry, uncertainty—so cinephilia, too, involves this mixture. "Cinephilia," Keller writes, "is characterized, like love, by an attitude of volatility" (1). Cinephilia is as pleasurable as it is perilous; it is a source not only of enjoyment but also anxiety. To ground her argument, Keller begins with a reassessment of the traditional account of cinephilia. Cinephilia, she asserts, can no longer be understood as a specialized form of experience available only to an elevated audience defined by the presumed sophistication of its aesthetic sensibility. This account, epitomized by Sontag's view and most directly identified with the film culture of postwar France, is both too nostalgic and too limiting to respond to the changing conditions of cinema today. Instead, Keller argues, we should understand cinephilia as belonging to anyone for whom the experience of cinema matters, for whom cinema has the capacity to incite love. Love of cinema, as with love elsewhere, she writes, should not be legislated; as she pointedly puts it, "Who am I to say how to love?" (86). This, then, is the book's democratizing impulse: its desire to overturn the divide between elite and popular, to recast cinephilia as at once irreducibly personal and widely accessible. To highlight the point, Keller draws attention to the related divide between the cinephile and the fan. While the two are distinct, she says, they also overlap in significant ways; in each, there is an intense enthusiasm marked by the desire not only to watch or consume one's given object but also to debate, talk, and write about it. Keller's argument thus follows the recent tendency in film studies to see technological change not as undermining an ostensibly proper love of cinema but instead as opening cinephilia [End Page 196] to both new forms of media and more diverse publics. We see precisely this argument in the 2005 volume Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, an influential collection...

Kenneth Berger

Cultural Critique

Cultural Critique provides a forum for international and interdisciplinary explorations of intellectual controversies, trends, and issues in culture, theory, and politics. Emphasizing critique rather than criticism, the journal draws on the diverse and conflictual approaches of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, political economy, and hermeneutics to offer readings in society and its transformation.

Cultural Critique serves as an international and interdisciplinary forum for exploring intellectual controversies, trends, and issues in culture, theory, and politics. Emphasizing critique rather than mere criticism, the journal draws on diverse and conflicting approaches from Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, political economy, and hermeneutics to provide in-depth readings of society and its transformations.

《Cultural Critique》是一个国际性和跨学科的论坛，专注于文化、理论和政治中的知识争议、趋势和问题。该期刊强调批判而非单纯的批评，借鉴了马克思主义、女性主义、精神分析、符号学、政治经济学和解释学等多种冲突性的方法，提供对社会及其变革的深入解读。

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Unsettled Spectatorship: On Anxiety and the Elusive Love of Cinema

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Category	Quartile
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