BA (Calvin, Michigan), MA (Carleton)
Dissertation: The Cinephilic Method: From Cinematic Encounter to Critical Inquiry
Examining Committee:
Scott Henderson (Supervisor), Michael Epp, Joshua Synenko
External Examiner: Keir Keightley, Western University
Internal Exmainer: Karl Manis
Chair: Aaron Kreuter
Abstract
This dissertation develops cinephilia—the love of cinema—as a productive method of scholarly inquiry. It begins from a tension between the affective attachment that often motivates sustained engagement with film and the critical distance conventionally associated with academic analysis. Rather than treating subjective response either as an impediment to interpretation or as sufficient evidence in itself, the dissertation proposes that moments of unusual cinematic fascination can function as starting points for rigorous investigation. The cinephilic method developed here moves outward from such encounters through close formal analysis, historical research, theoretical engagement, and intertextual inquiry, allowing the questions generated by particular films and moments to determine the direction of analysis.
This argument is developed across three interconnected projects. The first reconsiders historical and contemporary understandings of cinephilia and develops the cinephiliac moment into a bottom-up analytical practice. The second investigates one possible basis for the perceptual and affective force underlying such encounters by examining affinities between cinema and the human mind, particularly memory, imagination, dreaming, and subjective perception. The third puts the method into sustained practice through an extended analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), demonstrating how attention to particular images, performances, stylistic patterns, and intertexts can open onto questions of film history, historical memory, cognition, spectatorship, and cinematic ontology.
Ultimately, the dissertation argues that cinephilic attachment and analytical rigor need not be opposing modes of engagement. Cinephilia does not determine what a film means; it can help determine where inquiry begins. Understood as an affectively invested, formally attentive, and historically alert disposition toward cinematic experience, the cinephilic method provides a means of acknowledging the spectator’s encounter with cinema while remaining answerable to evidence, scholarship, and the larger structures of the film.
Keywords: cinephilia; cinephilic method; film theory; spectatorship; cognition; memory; film
history; Quentin Tarantino