Cinephilia

"[2] As described by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Frémaux, "The definitive essence of cinephilia is a culture of the discarded that prefers to find intellectual coherence where none is evident and to eulogize the non-standard and the minor.

[4] Since the beginning of the silent era, there have been film clubs and publications in which people who felt passionately about cinema could discuss their interests and see rare and older works.

The community fostered an interest in directors and films that had been neglected, forgotten or simply unknown in the West, and led to the development of the auteur theory.

The directors the French cinephiles of the period had strong interests in included F. W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, Louis Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, the Lumière brothers, Alfred Hitchcock and Georges Méliès, whose films would be screened from nitrate prints on special occasions.

[1][3] Directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the US and influenced the young generation of film enthusiasts who would become the New Hollywood, including Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen.

Films championed by cinephiles and Western intellectuals as "cutting-edge" and "revolutionary" from the 1960s-1970s included Lindsay Anderson's Cannes-winning epic If...., Humberto Solás's Lucía and Glauber Rocha's Antonio das Mortes alongside multiple works by Godard and the agitprop documentaries of The Newsreel.

In the English-speaking world, established critics and theorists like Dave Kehr, David Bordwell, Jonathan Rosenbaum,[18] Glenn Kenny, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Adrian Martin, as well as non-professional cinephiles like Girish Shambu played key roles in building interest in films or theories amongst cinephiles by writing and communicating through blogs.

Home video distribution labels and distributors such as The Criterion Collection, Masters of Cinema, Facets, Vinegar Syndrome and Kino cater to cinephiles, often including large amounts of supplemental and critical material with their releases.

[31][32] A notable series of video essays by Canadian filmmaker Stephen Broomer entitled Art & Trash focuses on underground, avant-garde and cult cinema (particularly outsider and psychotronic movies).

[49] Coined by The New York Times critic Frank Rich as a pejorative term, telephilia was defined as "the pathological longing of Americans, no matter how talentless, to be on television".

[58] Despite this development, there are still intellectuals [59] who consider telephilia as inferior to cinephilia, particularly in cases of obsessions for modern television programs belonging to genres such as melodrama and soap opera.

[60] This is also explained by the view that highlighted the unattainable nature of the cinema, which makes it more desirable and extraordinary since it features a regime of presence-yet-absence filmic image, allowing a form of cinematic stardom capable of triggering a series of psychic mechanisms.

"[61] Some observers, however, note that there is now a destabilization of traditional notions of what constitutes cinephilic tendency due to the availability of film on home media technology.

The Italian director Federico Fellini , a fashionable figure in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, owed part of his popularity to the support of film critics and the distribution of foreign films in order to accommodate the increasingly sophisticated public.
Wong Kar-wai ( pictured ) is a renowned arthouse film director from Hong Kong known for works such as Chungking Express (1994) and In the Mood for Love (2000).
Though his films have met with mixed commercial and critical success, American director Michael Mann (pictured above at Cinémathèque Française in 2009) is often considered to be a major figure of vulgar auteurism by contemporary cinephiles. [ 16 ] [ 17 ]
American director and cinephile Quentin Tarantino often makes references in his work to films and directors he admires.