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Celebrating the recent release of no less than two Alexander Sokurov box sets, Vanity Celis dives into one of the Russian master's earliest features, Save and Protect, to take a closer look at some of Sokurov's cinematic strategies.

Anke Brouwers on the subsequent rediscoveries of Mary Pickford and her admirers' eternal struggle with ... curls (and what they represent).

On the occasion of the release of Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, our man Vito Adriaensens delves into the Master of Suspense’s culinary predilections. Food for thought, after the jump.

As I mentioned in my roundup of the Cinephilia Rediscovered Series at Il Cinema Ritrovato last summer in Bologna, most of the debates about transformed cinephilia that film festivals set up today produce two polar categories of cinephiles. While nostalgic nitrate-lovers muse about a past age of filmmaking and film reception, a new generation of young Turks recognises that there is no better method for arousing cinephilia than the introduction of new mechanisms and technologies into the film experience. Girish Shambu is without a doubt one of the most representative of these new cinephiles, so his answer to the question I tend to propose the cinephiles I meet, did not come as a surprise.

Nuovo cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)

Given the current ubiquitous attention for the notion of cinephilia, it did not come as a surprise that Il Cinema Ritrovato, the Bologna Film Festival that is unequivocally acclaimed among film buffs and professionals as one of the most cinephile events on the calendar, explicitly included the love for cinema in this year’s programme. By dedicating a series of panel discussions to cinephilia, its manifestations, transformations and contemporary relevance, Il Cinema Ritrovato echoed similar projects at other film festivals. With Project New Cinephilia, the 2011 Edinburgh International Film Festival probably developed the most elaborate programme so far, including a day-long symposium, the (online) publication of a series of essays and debates, and forum discussions hosted by MUBI. However, many of today’s film festivals incorporate at least a debate on the status of cinephilia, often analysing the concept in relation to the precarious state of film criticism. On its website Project New Cinephilia has listed some of the most noteworthy discussions at other festivals.

Much of the brouhaha on blogs and elsewhere following the announcement of the results has focused on the dethroning of Citizen Kane, the movie that has led the poll since its inception in 1952. As Todd McCarthy points out in his response, the demotion of Welles’ film was a fait accompli after the campaign in S&S with an eye to both freshen up the poll and free Kane of its reputation as a dusty museum piece, the perennial ‘best movie ever.’ Losing to Vertigo by thirty votes (Ian Christie makes a lot of this, but what are thirty votes out of 864 critics, programmers, academics and distributors voting?), it’s not as if Kane has suddenly fallen completely out of favour: it has merely had Vertigo leap-frog over it, a movie that has been steadily climbing the polls and has not been out of the top ten since 1982.

This is our seventh entry on the 'Cinephilia Rediscovered' discussions at Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna, 2012). The discussions are available online, courtesy of the 'Cineteca di Bologna'.

As David Bordwell had to cancel his visit to Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival had to recruit one of its other guests to fill the empty seat at the final debate in the Cinephilia Rediscovered series. Fortunately, plenty of cinephile professionals made the trip to Bologna. Film and media scholar Henry Jenkins was found willing to take part in this sitting, which, as the festival brochure promised, would focus on American film criticism. Jenkins, who currently teaches at the University of South California, is perhaps chiefly known for his well-received book on the anarchism of the American film comedies of the 1930s, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (Columbia University Press, 1992). The panel discussion united him with Dave Kehr, one of America’s leading film critics, who currently authors a weekly column on new DVD releases for The New York Times and maintains the highly fascinating blog Reports from the Lost Continent of Cinephilia. Moreover, last year he published a collection of reviews from his days as the Chicago Reader’s film critic, called When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade (published by the University of Chicago Press). These unambiguously titled publications already slightly reveal the position he would take during the debate. I wondered how solidly Kehr, whose lucid analyses I admire, would be able to underpin his cinephiliac pessimism.

This is our fifth entry on the 'Cinephilia Rediscovered' discussions at Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna, 2012). The discussions are available online, courtesy of the 'Cineteca di Bologna'.

Doomsday Cinema Package

Aiming to investigate what lives among new generations of cinephile critics, Il Cinema Ritrovato dedicated the fifth of their panel discussions to the ‘New Cinephile Brigade’. With Olaf Möller, Christoph Huber and Gabe Klinger, Roy Menarini, curator of the Cinephilia Rediscovered series, invited three of the enfants terribles of this new wave of critics, so it promised to be an animated discussion. Known for their nonconformist opinions, Möller and Huber are the founding members and self-assigned ‘Other First Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Ferroni Brigade’, named after Giorgio Ferroni, a rather little-known Italian director of adventurous epics. Together with two other associates (Barbara Wurm and The Hidden Member) they regularly hand out their infamous Golden Donkey awards to important films that are in danger of being overlooked by traditional critics. Möller frequently writes for Cinema Scope and Film Comment, while Huber is the main film critic for the Austrian newspaper Die Presse and European editor of Cinema Scope. Despite sharing their views on cinema, Gabe Klinger is no official member of the Ferroni Brigade. Teaching film at the National-Louis University and Columbia College, he has published in Indiewire, Undercurrent and De Filmkrant.

Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, 1951)

Raoul Walsh, whose career spanned half a century, is perhaps the best illustration of Sam Fuller’s famous description of cinema in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou: cinema is like “a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word: emotion.”  All of this is true for most of the 100+ movies Walsh directed during his lifetime: as Tag Gallagher notes, for a director famous for his ultra-efficient action movies, there is a surprising undertone of tenderness and genuine emotion, especially in the way Walsh uses faces in close-up. The man was, after all, Irish. But I want to focus here on that aspect of Walsh’s cinema that so endeared him to both Andrew Sarris and the young cinéphiles at Cahiers du Cinéma: the fact that he was most famous for action.

Yesterday’s cinephilia session featured an intriguing debate between Girish Shambu, Miguel Marías and Jonathan Rosenbaum. The packed session, however, left me with some urgent questions, so I looked up Jonathan Rosenbaum for a short talk on his personal experiences as a cinephile. A topic that has recurred in every debate is the distinction that is often made today between two categories of cinephiles. On the one hand there are nitrate-loving nostalgics, who feel sceptic about the future of film criticism, cinephilia, and film in general, while on the other hand a new generation of cinephiles has come to the foreground, embracing new methods of film viewing and criticism.

This is our second entry on the 'Cinephilia Rediscovered' discussions at Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna, 2012). The discussions are available online, courtesy of the 'Cineteca di Bologna'.

The Film Critic of the Future, Today 

It felt appropriate to watch Jean Grémillon’s late impressionist film Gardiens de phare (marvellously shot by George Périnal, whose camerawork is omnipresent at Il Cinema Ritrovato, with screenings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and David Golder this weekend, and Bonjour Tristesse, Otto Premingers masterpiece in CinemaScope, on Wednesday) before attending the second debate on the state of cinephilia yesterday. I was overwhelmed by Grémillon’s audacious mise-en-scène, and, while walking from the Cinema Jolly to the festival centre, even got more excited. After all, the upcoming debate would feature Jim Hoberman, probably my favourite contemporary film critic. Being a self-proclaimed Hobermanbot, I of course deeply bemoaned that The Village Voice had recently, as part of cost-cutting measures, eliminated his position as a senior critic, but at the same time, this urged my curiosity about his vision on the endangered profession of the film critic.

This is our first entry on the 'Cinephilia Rediscovered' discussions at Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna, 2012). The discussions are available online, courtesy of the 'Cineteca di Bologna'.

With a promising series of debates on cinephilia, Il Cinema Ritrovato, taking place from 23 until 30 June in and around Bologna’s fabulous Cineteca, not only confirms its status as one of today’s most cinephile film festivals, it also connects with the widespread current discourse on the changing face of film criticism and the urgency of cinephilia within this shift. With Jean Douchet and Michel Ciment, the first debate reunited two of France’s most illustrious critics from the heyday of cinephilia. Moderated by Gian Luca Farinelli, director of the Cineteca, the session aimed to trace the history of cine-love, specifically analysing the prominence of the concept within France’s most renowned film magazines, Cahiers du cinéma (Douchet) and Positif (Ciment).