cinephile, talking or even reading about the movies is not enough. Cinephilia desires

written discourse.

 Historically, this desire to write, to find a gestural outlet, has been supported by the

establishment of the fan magazine or fanzine. But, as one might expect, cinephiliac

discourse in fanzines has been capricious, not theoretically rigorous. As Willemen notes,

cinephiliac discourse in fan magazines has the quality and tone of conversations between

film buffs. "When my school friends and I talked about the films we had seen," he

suggests, "there was an overlap between the way we did that and the professional,

stylized public performance of critical discourse as circulated by film magazines" (232).

For cinephiliac discourse in fanzines aims mostly at articulating the pleasures of the

cinematic text. That is perhaps why cinephilia is generally eschewed in film studies. In

fact, this desire to write about cinephiliac moments has not seriously been taken up by

academic film scholars. It is usually considered, as Doane points out, "a somewhat

marginalized, furtive, even illicit relation to the cinema rather than a theoretical stance. It

is the property of the film buff rather than the film theorist" (Emergence 225). The next

section theorizes the concept of cinephilia in order to show that the practice of isolating

peculiar details signals more than just an uncritical buffism. Although cinephilia remains

at the margins of film studies, there has been considerable critical interest in it as an

object of study in recent years. I will trace these developments and then locate cinephiliac

moments within the tradition of other disruptive viewing practices. Then, I will show

how Benjamin's theory of historical materialism can be used as an analogical method for

writing a cinephiliac history of Classic Hollywood cinema, one that provides "an escape

from systematicity-both that of a tightly regulated classical system and that of its