Such a history would also bear some resemblance to the practice of new

historicism. Like cinephiliac moments, the starting points of new historicism also resist

traditional modes of interpretation. Indeed, as Catherine Gallagher and Stephen

Greenblatt have suggested, new historicism can be regarded more accurately as a tactic or

a method, not another systematized form of interpretation. The new historicist project "is

not about 'demoting' art or discrediting aesthetic pleasure" (12). Instead, it is interested

in what Gallagher and Greenblatt call "counterhistories that make apparent the slippages,

cracks, fault lines, and surprising absences in the monumental structures dominated by a

more traditional historicism" (17). In fact, a cinephiliac history of Classic Hollywood

could rightly be regarded as one such counterhistory. What follows is that history,

narrated in three chapters. Each chapter begins with a cinephiliac moment that I am

personally struck by when I watch these films. I begin, in other words, with personal

memories, but the purpose of these moments is not to simply reproduce or interpret them

but to expand upon them. After all, as the fictional letter writer from Sans Soleil suggests,

"we do not remember; we rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten." In this project,

that history is rewritten with lightning.

 Chapter 2, "Show Stoppers: The Chance Encounter with Chiffons," explores the

accidental encounters between Surrealism and Classic Hollywood in the late 1930s

through a mysterious fur coat that falls on Jean Arthur's head in Mitchell Leisen's Easy

Living (1937). In its formative years, the studio system happily explored the excessive

allure of couture for shocking visual effects, even at the expense of the narrative. But in

the 1930s, Hollywood filmmaking became more linearized, and those visual details that

did not fit the narratives were cut out. The idea of chance, which is central to Surrealism,