Metz's comments suggest an underlying distrust of cinematic pleasures, especially as

points of entry into film scholarship. The task of the film scholar after the late 1960s was

to subvert the personal and eccentric cinematic pleasures in order to have something

meaningful to say about cinema. Writing about the "three ages" of cinema studies,

Dudley Andrew argues that underdr the moral pressure of 1968, film students aimed to

theorize the political, cinematic, and academic orders and to be wary of the tricks and

seductions of the establishment" (345). Although this kind of suspicion is no longer

acknowledged as actively as it used to be in the 1970s, the general position of academic

film studies with regard to cinephilia, even after the turn away from "grand theory"

toward cultural studies, has not changed very much.

 Even in the past decade, when the notion of cinephilia has become current again,

academic film scholars have remained mostly silent, assuming perhaps that there cannot

be much in common between the serious pursuit of cinema studies and the capricious

pleasures of cinema. Writing about the difficulty of talking about cinematic excess,

Kristin Thompson argues that the reason excessive details tend to elude analysis is

because "a discussion of the qualities of the visual figure at which we look seems

doomed to a certain subjectivity" (490; original emphasis). Likewise, because they are

subjective and capricious, cinephiliac pleasures are difficult to posit as serious objects of

study. They appear only in moments that, as my father tried to articulate, can be "caught"

in brief flashes. On a similar note, Willemen suggests that they are "experienced in an

encounter between you and cinema, which may be different from the person sitting next

to you, in which case you have to dig him or her in the ribs with your elbow to alert them

to the fact that you've just had a cinephiliac moment" (237). But these elusive moments