It is always surprising this moment, this movement, always and without fail it takes
 me aback. Yet what can it mean to yoke these incommensurate terms-always and
 surprising? ... I can't quite put my finger on the feeling it evokes, though there is a
 phrase of [Jean] Epstein's that resonates: "On the line of communication the static
 of unexpected feelings interrupts us." ("I Think" 350; original emphasis)
While the moments themselves may differ, the initial cinephiliac spark evokes very
similar feelings.

7 Starting with Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking thesis in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema," Vertigo has been enormously popular (or unpopular) as a text for film criticism,
but what Morris suggests, drawing on Paul de Man, is that the film ultimately renders
these readings as untenable allegories. Patricia White also tends to accept this argument;
although she continues to read the film from a feminist perspective, she argues in
"Allegory and Referentiality" that in their attempt to uncover a "single dominant reality,"
film critics have elided their own narratives (931).

8 In 1996, Sontag wrote a similar piece for the New York Times Magazine called "The
Decay of Cinema," which stimulated a lot of American critics to reflect on the status of
cinema as well as the function of cinephilia. My citations here appear from the original
essay, "A Century of Cinema."

9 In Myths and Memories, Gilbert Adair offers a number of personal memories about the
movies that are very similar in form to the few I list here.

10 The student and worker protests that ignited a political revolution in May 1968 initially
began over the dismissal of Henri Langlois as director of the Cinematheque, and they
critically impacted the development of film studies. Sylvia Harvey's May '68 and Film
Culture provides an extensive exploration of that impact on film culture.

11 While through most of the book, Doane argues that narrative cinema sides with
standardization by repressing contingency, in the last chapter, where she discusses
cinephilia, the argument seems to turn on itself. Cinema, she writes
 has also historically worked to make the contingent legible. And despite the
 development of stricter limitations and codes regulating the cinematically
 representable, the mainstream classical narrative continued to exploit the idea of the
 filmability of the contingent without limit, of the lush overabundance of things, of
 details, diversity, and multiplicity characterizing the diegesis, of its access to a time
 uncontaminated by rationalization and necessity, and as the antithesis of
 systematicity and the site of newness and difference itself. (Emergence 230)
I am not sure how to read Doane's shift at the end, but I will note that the apparent
revision serves to open up the book's central argument onto a more productive historical
perspective.

12 For Benjamin, cinema encouraged this mode of viewership. "Reception in a state of
distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of