i regret – and for once this is a statement of fact, not a pro forma apology – that i don’t have the time to read the probably interesting book by keathley, so i hope i may be forgiven for taking a short cut and asking one question about its argument:  do “cinephiliac moments” work differently than great lines of literature . . . we all [i suspect] have lines we love to quote out of context because they seem so resonant . . . sometimes these are lines from “great” works, at other times the isolated moments are all that makes the work memorable;  and sometimes the isolated moment is resonant as a function of its relationship to the whole, while at other times it resonates on a completely separate wavelength

 

i would have thought that these lines are closely analogous to cinephiliac moments – but maybe i’m missing something

 

mike

 

 

 

 

 

Christian Keathley's recent book Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees (2005) traces the development of an interest in the “cinephiliac moment” - exactly the sort of discrete film moments that are coming up in this thread. He argues that it is this interest in the “moment” rather than in films as a whole that can be seen to define a certain discourse of cinephilia in the 20th century and beyond (from Bazin to Perkins to somebody like Andy Klevan):

http://www.amazon.com/Cinephilia-History-Trees-Christian-Keathley/dp/0253217954/ref=ed_oe_p/102-4688875-6932133

A related book would be John Gibbs and Douglas Pye’s edited collection Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Wallflower, 2005). However, I find that the emphasis on micro-analysis (perhaps something that is also bothering me in the concurrent thread on film and language) sometimes loses a sense of what is actually interesting about the films themselves – that is, that they are fictional narratives (i.e. something more than the sum of their shot/reverse shots). Of course, the best of this sort of writing shows that the micro is a metaphor of/for the macro...

David