cinema." Moreover, recent studies of cinephilia, although in ways very different from

those of the classical cinephiles, have been more or less descriptive. Either new

cinephiles have focused on historicizing what classical cinephilia was, or they have tried

to show how new cinephilia is (or is not) like the old one. The larger issue, one that this

project tries to tackle, is this: once we have identified it, what kind of knowledge can we

produce using cinephilia? How do we deploy cinephilia as a critical practice? Quite

simply, what can we do with cinephiliac moments?

 These questions bring us back to academic film studies and the role of cinephilia in

it. The first generation of cinephiles was eager to recapture epiphanic moments in

writing, but they were not able to extend their pleasurable discoveries into knowledge.

Attached to the erratic detail, their mode of writing remained invested in what Doane

calls "a private, idiosyncratic meaning [that was] nevertheless characterized by the

compulsion to share what is unsharable, inarticulable" (Emergence 227). That is why the

kind of writing practiced at Cahiers was not embraced by film scholarship. Especially

after the counter-cultural uprisings of May 1968,10 cinephiles became increasingly

political and suspicious of visual pleasure. Film scholarship, even at Cahiers, committed

itself to an unambiguously anti-cinephiliac position. We might call this moment the

semiotic turn, when the focus shifted from the cinematic experience to the cinematic

apparatus. At this stage, Christian Metz famously declared in his groundbreaking study of

cinema and psychoanalysis that

 [t]o be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema
 and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only have detached oneself from it by
 taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target for the very same scopic
 drive which had made one love it. (15)