techniques and an equally intense nostalgia for the disintegrating Hollywood studio

system, "cinema appeared to be reborn" ("Century" 121).

 But today, according to Sontag, that kind of passion for the movies-for both

avant-garde and popular cinema-is dead. The purpose of Sontag's centennial dirge was

not just to proclaim that cinema was dead. With the balance having tipped decisively in

favor of cinema as an industry, she argued, cine-love itself has now passed away.

Cinephilia, which for Sontag was "not simply love of but a certain taste in films

(grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema's

glorious past)," has not survived ("Century" 122; original emphasis). Rather than serving

as the final word on this passionate mode of spectatorship, however, Sontag's elegy

sparked a resurgence of international interest in cinephilia. Since then, numerous

reassessments of cinephilia have appeared, mostly from film critics, filmmakers, and

independent scholars worldwide. Indeed, if the period between 1945 and the late 1960s

was the moment of cinephilia, then the last decade has witnessed something of a

resurrection. Cinephilia may be dead, but its ghost still lingers in contemporary writing

about cinema.

 Before turning to the reception of cinephilia by academic film studies, I would like

to discuss another camp of film scholars, who rejected outright Sontag's premise that

cinephilia was dead and instead set about defining its transformation in today's

globalized film culture. Although the conversation about the reemergence of cinephilia a

decade ago may have begun wistfully, considering what it was and mourning its alleged

demise, the focus quickly shifted in some quarters to what it might yet become. In 1999,

the Australian-based online journal Senses of Cinema issued an exciting collection of