Cinephilia Special Feature (Part II)

Permanent Ghosts: Cinephilia in the Age of the Internet and Video. Intro by Steve Erickson: This series of essays was borne out of frustration and anger: frustration at premature, glib declarations of the death of cinema, cinephilia and/or film criticism, and anger at being told implicitly or explicitly that I was born too late to really understand all of the above. Faced with this wave of melancholic nostalgia, I decided it was worth asking how film culture has been altered – for better and for worse – by the rise of video and the Internet. I was particularly stimulated by the Movie Mutations exchange published in Trafic and Film Quarterly, but wanted to extend that piece’s spirit to a younger group of writers. With the exception of David Sterritt, all the writers who contributed to “Permanent Ghosts” are in their late 20s or early 30s. Ny Press critic Armond White has recently opined that “Generation X” has such bad taste that we’re a lost cause, while his colleague Godfrey Cheshire organized a symposium on the “end of cinema” at the Museum of Modern Art; faced with such apocalyptic generalizations, I think it’s important to examine how new forms of cinephilia and discourse about film may be emerging.