The New Cinephilia

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today’s “new cinephilia” and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Each activity of today’s cinephilic practice – viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films – is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet. As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today’s cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation. Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models. This book both describes and theorises how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today.

Girish Shambu is a cinephile and Associate Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He runs a community-oriented film blog named “girish” at girishshambu.blogspot.com, and co-edits, with Adrian Martin, the on-line cinema journal LOLA. His writings have appeared in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Artforum.com, Cineaste and in the collection Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 1: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture (Wallflower Press).