Cinephilia: the empowering love of cinema that must never turn toxic

Article - Matei Norbert Balan

Copyright: Paramount Pictures & Warner Bros / Foto: IMDb

There's a particular line in Christopher Nolan's 2014 movie, “Interstellar”,which makes me roll my eyes in my head so hard that I can take a good and long look at my cervical spine. In what was probably supposed to be a heartfelt scene, Cooper (Matthew Mcconaughey) doubts Brand's (Anne Hathaway) reasoning on the matter of which of the two distress signals they should follow - she leans towards pursuing the one who would potentially lead them to her partner, who has gone missing during a previous mission. Brand explains how and what she feels like this:

"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it." 

The fact that it's a blatantly inauthentic way of expressing a complex idea is not the issue here. The problem is that it leaves nothing out. It is the movie's central theme, Nolan's big stake in this project, and it is presented to us in a manner that doesn't indicate that the director trusts us, the audience, to put two and two together. One could be excused if in that very moment they felt robbed of any potential katharsis or revelation for the movie's ending. Love does transcend time. But Nolan just flashes this idea at us, instead of allowing us to come to the conclusion ourselves.  

A lot of the American and British critics seemed to have a similar stance of disappointment. David Denby, from The New Yorker, dismissed the movie as being "a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it." And David Thompson, who writes for The Guardian, said that "Interstellar is an entertainment disaster for reasons that have dogged our films since they began: ridiculous story; implausible segues; laughable dialogue; the absence of character, drama, and command.". 

However, the audience loved the movie. It still does. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 85%. Peter Travers, who writes for The Rolling Stone, sided with the audience on this one and explained that "what the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly Nolan explores the infinite in the smallest human details."

So who's wrong and who's right? Everybody and nobody. 

Here's another thing that makes me roll my eyes when I hear people talking about “Interstellar”. It is just so filled with love and passion. It is so obvious that you notice it even if you're trying to look away. Say what you will of the movie's flaws, but this is a project made by a director who truly loves cinema. To me, watching “Interstellar” is pretty close to watching a couple passionately kissing in the middle of the street. It is so crystal clear that they're having a thing going that it infuriates you. And when it comes to cinema, the love some of us have for it can be both divisive and unifying.

This love of cinema is most commonly known as cinephilia, a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia (one of the four ancient Greek words for love). The French philosopher Jacques Rancière said, during an interview that he gave back in 2010, that cinephilia is composed both of the sharing of love for cinema and of something which is more reflective. This reflective something he places in what he calls a "kingdom of shadows", an immaterial place where cinema actually happens, between the screen and the viewer, our memory. The act of remembering a movie is something we often don't pay attention to, even though it is the only way a movie can exist for us outside the cinema or TV screen. When talking about his experience as a young movie goer and lover, Rancière points out that this "was a very important thing about cinephilia: it was based on a work of remembering, with all its alterations, because films were less available." And it is these alterations that we, critics, ordinary moviegoers, and directors alike, all have in common, they are our way of re-editing a movie in our mind. For these reasons, Rancière concludes that "cinema is also an art of the spectator.".

Movie spectatorship as we experience it today is closer to what sports rivalries are. There is a team or a club whose honor has to be defended at all costs and this means that the other team or club has to be absolutely obliterated. These clubs can be anything from Dogme 95' to the Marvel franchise. Movies like “The Last Jedi” can divide audiences to such an extent that online arguments turn into actual cyberbullying. It is what happened to Kelly Marie Tran, who was harassed by the self-proclaimed die-hard fans of Star Wars up to the point where she had to delete her Instagram account. This is not cinephilia. 

In the same interview, Jacques Rancière also mentions that when we experience cinema the act looking is what gives us power over it while also allowing the medium itself to exercise its influence over us. And in relation to it, we have a culture of the look that we all have access to nowadays. But like all accessible things this too can be taken for granted. Just because we have access to it it doesn't mean we fully understand it. Which is another way of saying that just because we are looking it doesn't mean we're actually seeing. 

Love does transcend time and so can cinema. What they can't do is to divide us. That is something else and we shouldn't trust it, even if we think we can understand it.