The New Cinephilia

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today's "new cinephilia" and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Each activity of today's cinephilic practice - viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films - is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet. As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today's cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation. Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models. 

The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2022) both describes and theorises how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today. In this expanded second edition, author Girish Shambu revisits some of his original ideas and calls into question the focus in cinephilia on the male canon in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the lack of racial and gender diversity in contemporary cinema. As Dr. Shambu writes:"There is more to the cinephile experience than simply surfing from one link to another in a state of perpetual motion. How does this movement - this daily proliferation of encounters - power one's cinephilia? What special affective charge does this experience hold? In other words, how is the experience of the Internet cinephile affectively different from that of a 'traditional' cinephile who spends little time online?" 

In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Shambu talks working as a Professor of Management while maintaining his profile as a prolific cinephile, explains why auteurism is a "manspreading machine," and offers recommendations on what films exemplify a "cinema of the future."

Girish Shambu is Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches sustainability and supply chain management. In a dual career as film blogger, critic and scholar, Girish is also the author of The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2020, 2nd ed.) and editor of Film Quarterly’s online column Quorum. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection, Framework Journal of Film & Media, and Film Quarterly. 

In addition to being a host on New Books in Film, Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television. You can read her reviews and essays at Literary Hub, Public Books, LA Review of Books, The A.V. Club, Little White Lies, Film Quarterly, and The Washington Post.