Cinematic Promiscuity:

Cinephilia after
Videophilia
Lucas Hilderbrand
If there was a politique to the Cahiers du cinma crews politique des auteurs,
it was about taking popular culture seriously by elevating certain directors to
the status of artists. This continental model certainly elicited an aspiration
to serious filmgoing Stateside. But around the same time, a more crassly
American cinephilia was eloquently captured in the first chapter of Walker
Percys novel The Moviegoer (1961) by a cinema marquee slogan: Where Hap-
piness Costs So Little. At the risk of being essentialist, if the French model
of cinephilia was about films and erudition, America film buffery has been
about how good movies make you feeland how easily.
In the past three decades, home video has radically altered cinephilia by
making movie love even more diffused. The politics of video have, from the
beginning, been a politics of access. Home video technologies facilitated a
new relationship to movies, and a collector culture exploded in ways different
from the preexisting memorabilia or small-gauge film markets. In the early
history of home video, manufacturers such as Sony did not envision the tech-
nology for releasing movies, and the Hollywood studios originally wanted
nothing to do with it. Rather, it was buffs who made their own recordings and
small business owners who developed the video store industry.1 Movie lovers
defined how home video would be used.
For a time, film purists took reactionary positions against videoeven if
video made the films cinephiles loved more accessible. Film scholars were
likewise ambivalent about video. Two articles by Charles Tashiro illustrate
this well: in Videophilia (1991), Tashiro examines the aesthetic damage
done by VHS releases that pan-and-scan, crop, or uncrop theatrical aspect
ratios, whereas in The Contradictions of Video Collecting (1996), he
acknowledges the pleasures of owning movies on video.2 More alarming, in

Framework 50, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 21417.
Copyright 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.
 Cinephilia after Videophilia

1991 members of the Society of Cinema Studies issued a statement asserting

that using video for class screenings, which had become a practical reality,
threatened to undermine the integrity of the discipline. (This political posi-
tion was targeted less at video per se than at campus administrators seek-
ing to cut film rental budgets.)3 And although I have asserted a particular
and affective aesthetic for analog video elsewhere, lets be honest: classroom
video projectors exaggerate the limited resolution of VHS, making every-
thing look ugly.
But video also remediated and legitimated cinema. Home video reval-
orized cinematic exhibition and recognition of the specificities of celluloid
and public viewing; VHS made film look better by comparison, and DVD
letterboxing calls attention to framing. Even if I am one of the video genera-
tion, I still love projected celluloid and make distinctions in how I see specific
works. But what home video revealed about cinema was not only a purity
of the image; it also allows for the recognition of a kind of public sphere at
screenings that cannot exist for home video. Part of the pleasure of going
to retrospectives, festivals, and cinematheques is the audience; even if social
interactions rarely occur and a true community never quite coalesces, there
is at least a kind of identification that occurs when fellow film buffs come
together. Screenings in public venues are by definition shared experiences.
This classic sort of cinephilia can only exist in cosmopolitan urban loca-
tions: New York, Paris, London, San Francisco. As a kid and teenager in a
small town, I spent most of my spare time watching videos from the public
library, video store, or grocery store (which had cheaper new releases). I was a
voracious videophile. Living in New York City later was a cinephiles dream.
Most of the art theaters are shit holes with uncomfortable seats, bad sight-
lines, and lousy sound systems, but you can see just about anything. Now I
live in Southern California, where the theaters are generally nicer and there
are still actual movie palaces. But there are far fewer classics, foreign art films,
or obscurities to see. LA cinephilia, logically, is more about fascination with
the Hollywood golden age than with the underground or the global. And it
seems to be more active in video stores such as Eddie Brandts Saturday Mati-
nee. Here and in other places subject to sprawl, video becomes the medium of
movie love. But the cities still usually have the best video stores.
Cinephilia may have something to do with unavailability and the joy of
seeing something against the odds. Films that play hard to get are the ones we
want the most. Video, as a reproductive technology, was introduced for mak-
ing recordings, and film buffs from the very beginning were bootleggers. For
analog videotape, recordingswhether off ephemeral television broadcasts
or from an obscure source tapedemonstrated a deliberate attempt to own
a text, often achieved through convoluted circumstances or long-distance
black market commerce. Such recordings almost always looked terrible and
sounded worse; they were marked by generational decay and the glitches
of low-end equipment. Today, collectors edition DVDs have made many

215
Lucas Hilderbrand

more titles available with professional reproduction values, but they have
depersonalized the process of collecting videos. Collecting has become more
an act of consumption than creation, and such special editions are often
little more than marketing.
Cinephiles continue to take content into their own hands through appro-
priation, which becomes visible from art galleries to YouTube. With video,
the accessibility of content meets the accessibility of reproductive technology.
And this love is rarely expressed within the confines of copyright law. While
studios have been mostly concerned with piracy of complete works, clipping
and recontextualizing has become a major practiceone that reduces nar-
rative features to a stream of images, gestures, and moments. Some of these
remixes are intended as ideological critiques, but more often they express the
makers adoration and identification with specific content.
I suspect that cinephilia has always had something to do with differ-
ence. The Cahiers cinephiles embraced American cinema; Americans in
mid-century embraced films by the European (and a few Japanese) masters.
Today theres still an element of distinction at work in the preferences for film
society screenings of esoteric Iranian or Thai films. But often alienation is an
identity experience for movie lovers, not just a theme for art films. Film geeks,
who have become almost mainstream, have tended to feel like social outsid-
ers, which perhaps suggests their proclivities for sci-fi set in other worlds or
violent horror narratives of revenge. Videophilia has become a lifeline for
millions of people who dont belong.
Film has also provided both escapism and identification for queer audi-
ences. Gay viewers have a well-documented cinephiliac tendency to seek
out and fixate upon fleeting moments of queerness or diva fabulosity. Dark
movie theaters were also, historically, one of the most active places for same-
sex cruising and public sex. Video facilitated access to classic or gay texts
for those isolated in the hinterlands, but it has also killed off the theater as
a charged space of consummated desires. At a time when gay visibility and
politics have become relatively normative, many of the most interesting queer
films of the home video eraThe Long Day Closes, Super 8 1/2, The Watermelon
Woman, Gods and Monsters, Goodbye Dragon Inn, and Bad Education, as well as
Far from Heaven and Mark Rappaports workare conceived out of their mak-
ers cinephilia and their drives to bring sex back to the cinema.
The most cinephiliac text I have experienced in the cinema latelyone
that has had film critics rhapsodizingis actually about rewatching a single
sequence on video. In Wall-E, a robot cleaning up the messes of a post-human
Earth cherishes a centuries-old videotape of Hello Dolly! and plays Michael
Crawfords musical numbers each night. A movie has filled this little robot,
like so many of us cinephiles, with romantic fantasies. Wall-E loves his video-
tape because its content makes him feel full of love even though hes alone.
Home video has revealed the specificity of the cinema, but it also allows
us to view films more intimately. I am more likely to experience distanced

216
 Cinephilia after Videophilia

aesthetic appreciation in a theater but more emotional openness at home.

The experiences are different, though mutually constitutive. Certainly my
own love of film has much to do with the history of cinema that has become
available through tapes and discs. If there is such a thing as a politics of con-
temporary cinephiliaand I dont think there is any dominant or coherent
political position in cinephilia todayit may be the breakdown of a strict
conception of the term. Cinephilia has splintered from a rarefied specialist
milieu or purist aesthetics to include more everyday practices. There are
many ways to love movies, whether in a theater or at home, and each con-
text may reveal its own specificity. Sometimes we watch because we love
the movie, but other times its about seeing a new print or a social outing
or a private indulgence or skipping ahead to a single scene. Loving video
doesnt need to be shameful, and it doesnt mean we love film any less; it just
allows us to love more of the cinema.

Lucas Hilderbrand is assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of
California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape
and Copyright (2009).

Notes
1. See Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Inven-
tion of Movies on Video (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
2. Charles Tashiro, Videophilia: What Happens When You Wait for It on Video,
Film Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 717, and The Contradictions of Video
Collecting, Film Quarterly 50, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 1118.
3. Society for Cinema Studies Task Force on Film Integrity, Statement on the Use
of Video in the Classroom, Cinema Journal 30, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 36.

217
Copyright of Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media is the property of Wayne State University Press and
its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.