In her landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey concludes by saying that one goal of film theory is “to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” However ambivalent about the object she describes, Mulvey writes out of a fervor motivated by the history of classical Hollywood film and feminist analysis. That is, while one pleasure might be destroyed in the process of analysis, it is replaced by another. This is in part what Roland Barthes means when he suggests that we bring to the cinema “an amorous distance.” It is also akin to the ambivalence that Christian Metz enacts when he writes, “I have loved the cinema, I no longer love it. I still love it.” Whatever distance or detachment each writer demands of the film viewer, each also acknowledges that our relation to the cinema, to film, and to film theory also contains a kind of love, fueled by passion.
In an attempt to investigate the connections between cinephilia and cinema studies, this seminar will focus on a collection of theoretical readings fueled by both passionate attachments to and detachments from the object we love, no longer love, and still love. With a special focus on the “subject” – the “I” – that writes theory, we will therefore look at these writings as a set of ideas born out of passion, experience, and the generation of intellectual thought in an attempt, ultimately, to understand these processes as not mutually exclusive. The intellectual goal of this seminar is to produce an amorous distance and an intellectual intimacy with something we think we know and can never know