Darnton, I would argue that everything in Classic Hollywood appears similarly strange,

once you examine it in detail. It is a little like rewriting the birth of the nation by focusing

on the problem of toothache-that is what a cinephiliac history has enabled us to do.

 In the process, I have also sought to inject some of that cinephiliac pleasure into the

writing of these essays. For this project is not a history of cinephilia. It is a cinephiliac

history, and as such, it follows a different methodology than traditional histories of

cinema. Although I do not think we should return to the kind of passionate, but more or

less uncritical, writing practiced at the Cahiers du Cinema, I do believe that we can

recover some of that experience and combine it with our traditional modes of analysis.

Sylvia Harvey has similarly argued that "one of the challenges of current secular

criticism [is] to reconstruct or re-invent a sense of the sacred and the immortal, and

perhaps to find other words than these to refer to the constant presence of the

extraordinary within the ordinary, to foreground significance which is present without

words" (28). One of those other words to be used for this experience could be cinephilia.

It captures the feeling of something exciting and pleasurable, but it also lends itself to a

critical practice. Of course, that practice will be different too. In the introduction, I

suggested that what I was offering was an experimental history, and I would like to end

by reflecting on that idea.

 My primary source of influence for experimentation with film studies has been

Robert B. Ray's The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Published in the same year as

Susan Sontag's essay that proclaimed the death of cinephilia, Ray's book offers this

proposal: "the appropriation of avant-garde experimentation for the purposes of

humanities research" (199). Ray himself draws on the Surrealist tradition, arguing that