**Sylvie Pierre [SP]:** I'll start by saying that I can't put the feelings that tied me to Serge, which were essential, into parenthesis. He was a friend and partner in crime in the *Cahiers* context from 1967 on, a friendship that became firmer when I returned from a five-year stay in Brazil. I don't say this to talk myself up, but the global dimension of cinema—the fact that we had to travel to discover it worldwide—was very important for *Trafic*. How we became a global limited circulation journal has become a joke I often make! It's the same conviction Daney had and was emphasized by Patrice when he edited Daney's writings and entitled the collections *La Maison cinéma et le monde*—Serge's 'post card' dimension, which was central rather than incidental to the way he worked.

So I was a close friend of Serge's, and when he fell ill, it became a personal thing. I saw him every day and we had extremely important conversations. I was looking after his *Trafic* project at the moment he became certain that he had AIDS and knew he was terminally ill. That context of urgency was extremely important in the creation of the journal and marked the birth of *Trafic* with a necessity—one of publishing texts that their authors really needed to get published, that were vitally important for them. Although in this crisis, some bad infinites were avoided: "academicism" in the bad sense of the word, pomposity, the dominance of knowledge...and that other bad infinite, the kind of subjective untidiness that lacks knowledge, properly corrected writing, and precise articulation. It's not the cult of Daney that interests us: we prefer to be of his religion than of his cult, if I may put it that way! We did this journal in the best way we could to be worthy both of him and of ourselves. Serge successfully put a team together that is holding good and whose members respect one another despite our often fairly considerable differences in sensibility. This is what makes us mutually complementary.

**Marcos Uzal [MU]:** When *Trafic* was born, I was on the other side—a reader. I heard about it on the radio: "a journal has just appeared created by Serge Daney with a poem by Godard" and I rushed out to buy that issue. And I remained a reader of *Trafic*
for a long time, with the feeling that it was to some extent “my
journal.” It was a continuation of the story of *Cahiers du cinéma*
that had been so important for me, even if I continued to read
*Cahiers*. I felt closer to *Trafic* when I did a masters degree on
Franju supervised by Jean Narboni, and he told me to write it up
and send it to *Trafic*. I wasn't faint-hearted and sent it to Patrice
and Jean-Claude Biette. And Patrice called me and said "we'll take
it," which was a very important moment in my life. After that I
wrote very regularly in *Trafic* until Raymond, Patrice and Sylvie
asked me to be on the editorial board, around 2010, and more
recently to join them on the executive. What I must say where
Daney is concerned is that in 1991 Daney was extremely active for
a young cinephile. It was known that he was going to die and that
he was preparing his legacy, by creating *Trafic* and also by doing
*Itinéraire d'un Cinéfils*, a very important moment. He was speaking
in the past tense about a life experience that was his and was
part of an era, and yet, because he was a young cinephile in 1991,
you could identify with his mode of cinephilia as an existential
experience. I'm the only person in the masthead who didn't know
Daney. I haven't felt the need to hero-worship Daney because
he doesn't call for that at all. His writing is so lively, diverse, and
engaging. There are contradictions in it and you can disagree with
him. You can extend the stimulating side of his writing.

Jean-Claude Biette

**PR:** Out of all of us, Jean-Claude Biette was the closest to Serge. They spent the last year of his life phoning each other to share live commentaries on the film each of them was watching!

**RB:** it was Jean-Claude who came up with the journal's title, spelt with one "f" but alluding to the English word "traffic" with two 'f's, which was important. There were five of us to start with, sadly soon reduced to four. We thought about stopping after Serge died, and then the sudden death of Jean-Claude left a huge hole in terms of friendship, affection, and everything he constantly
228 brought to the journal. And it also took us a while to ask Marcos to join us. To start with, at Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens's suggestion, we created the *Trafic* editorial board, the people making up what Serge called the "inner circle," people he had wanted to write from the start but who for various reasons remained peripheral: Jacques Bontemps, Leslie Kaplan, Pierre Léon, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Louis Schefer, and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

SP: Jean-Claude would make crazy plays on words that made us die laughing. He had a gift for defusing any potential conflict he saw emerging, including amongst us. Because this was linked to his very specific economy of friendship, which for me was a model. In his exchanges with other people he was one of the most thoughtful and subtlest people I've ever met. I think that what Jean-Claude had that was important, apart from his very long friendship with Serge, was the fact that they were both gay, which also created a profound complicity between them. Jean-Claude was a filmmaker and writer-critic, and when he was talking about films, he had a way of examining the famous alchemy of the auteur. Not only because the auteur had a universe of his own but because he was in touch with his actors and his crew, and so on. As a filmmaker himself, he was familiar with that kind of contact; he knew what it meant to make films. I remember a text of his I found outstanding, in his "à pied d'oeuvre [ready for work]" series around a magnificent Fellini film called *Il Bidone* [*The Swindle*] and the relationship between Fellini and Broderick Crawford. He spoke with extraordinary depth about what an auteur director is in his relationship with an actor. At *Trafic* we have always had difficulty finding texts by filmmakers that speak intelligently, sensitively, and precisely about their work. And that ability was what Jean-Claude represented.

## With and after Serge Daney

RB: The list of points I referred to earlier corresponds to the direction of a program we stuck to. There's only one point we
didn't manage to stick to regularly: letters by filmmakers. On the
other hand, I did manage to create interest in letters offering
news about cinema from many different countries of the world,
for nearly five years.

**PR:** Daney thought that we shouldn't do interviews any longer because all the interviews were too formulaic. We had to get filmmakers to write. He succeeded, and we succeeded, in getting some filmmakers to write. And we very quickly realized that documentarists wrote much more readily than fiction filmmakers. A certain number of filmmakers who had previously been critics would cut short their critical period at the moment at which they moved into directing. And filmmakers who continue to do both are very rare.

**SP:** Serge had a very deep-seated intention to inscribe something in time. To create an important object that would mark its era and that would *last*. And to move from journalism (obviously without scorning journalistic writing) to a journal, to something more serious. He insisted absolutely on this existence of the written object. Journals are markers of this kind: *Esprit, Les Temps modernes...* there are journals that mark national cultures.

**PR:** Part of Serge's idea of what a journal should be was also to establish a journal in the format of a literary review. Blanchot's *NRF* was important for Daney. There's another journal that didn't last long, Jean Louis Schefer's *Café*. We accepted several of Schefer's illustrations into *Trafic*, which were line drawings he had done in caves. It was a principle of *Café* that the only illustrations were line drawings.

## The Organization of Texts in *Trafic*

**RB:** Serge had a deep reverence for the solitary text. By this I mean that when *Trafic* began, the texts were essentially fundamentally solitary. This applied up to issue 11, at which point a strange thing happened: we simultaneously received a
230 text from Alain Bergala about *A Day in the Country* and one from Alain Fleischer who had restored the film and at the same time re-edited the rushes. Two texts about the same film, but from such different points of view that we could bring them together. And an idea came to me: in my cupboards I also had a marvelous little Astruc text that he had previously given to me, called "Sylvia Bataille, my actress." So we put the three together. And from that moment on, this represented a real change of policy in our way of working; we began to organize little curated groups of texts on a particular national cinema, a particular filmmaker, a particular film or trend, etc. We tried to construct little systems of echoes.

PR: There were special issues on Lang, Hitchcock, on Serge...
Serge didn't want the thematically organized kind of cinema journal of which a number existed at the time, even though he knew that this complicated things for us commercially. What happened is that we did a set of texts on Walsh, by commissioning each one of us. We are pragmatic, we want to do things as straightforwardly as possible. One thing that has to be emphasized is that *Traffic* doesn't have a discernable editorial line, more what could be called "thresholds" of quality for the texts selected. This was an important thing for Serge and for Jean-Claude: the text is all that counts. We sometimes published texts about films we had reservations about or were indifferent to, if the text was sufficiently illuminating. On the other hand, you have to be careful about the risk of academic wrong turns; there have to be committed positions. When Serge founded the journal, his state of health meant that he couldn't go to the cinema very much, but one or two films was enough for him to take a stance.

SP: This question of the journal's editorial line put me in a temper every time we were reproached for not having one. A journal's line or editorial policy is like a party's line, to be found on the horizon, like an ideal. It's pointless to proclaim it if the real-life acts that prepare for and constitute it are not up to the mark. In our case, these acts are the texts, which say (each in their own way, according to each author's own will): this is the direction
we want to go in together. So I wouldn't say that *Trafic's* editorial line makes itself: it is made with every quarterly issue by our way of preparing our groups of texts. One is paired with another when the texts reach us, either spontaneously through authors' suggestions or because we have commissioned a text on such or such a subject, for example one linked to current events. Patrice's work is essential here: he is the one who organizes the logic of our tables of contents. As far as our special issues are concerned, we do not write an editorial: we write a brief text that is a sort of statement of collective intention.

**PR:** After Serge died we wondered how we were going to go on. Did we need a chief editor, or two chief editors? In the end we said we were going to function as a collective; I used to like saying that were "the last soviet" (the 1905 one). We know that we have tastes and estimations of things that are sometimes unusual, but we have found a kind of enduring balance, and that really means something.

**MU:** Also, a kind of "politique des auteurs of the text" (Daney's expression) exists. There are texts on films or filmmakers who we would not on the face of it have published anything on, but on which a writer important to us sent us a text, and it matters to us to know what that author is going to say about that film.

**SP:** What interests me about *Trafic* is the freedom to write that it offers. Without formatting constraints, for example; a long or a short text, depending. We respect different styles and forms of freedom. After Serge died we didn't even want a chief editor any more. In each of our texts the author has constructed their own guiding principle and we have asked ourselves, either in our own writing or about the texts we have accepted "is this for us?", "does this correspond to what we are trying to find together?" We trust each other and this allows us to breathe, to talk freely about the cinema we love in the way we want to talk about it. This freedom is an amazing and incredible opportunity.
232 MU: I wrote for *Vertigo* for a long time. It was an extremely con-
straining journal in comparison to *Trafic*, because we started
with a theme—so the wrong way round, for me, for whom the
desire to write came after rather than before thematic ideas. We
did some fine things, but the problem was the constraint of the
theme, which I ran away from, literally. What is good about *Trafic*
is that we can write about whatever subject we want to. The last
film we saw or John Stahl...

PR: There is a loyalty from regular authors, such as those who
come from *Cahiers du cinéma*, but there are many young authors
who send us texts. Recently I published two texts by an author I
don't know and with whom I only spoke on the phone. He is called
Paul Choquet and wants to become a filmmaker. He sent us his
texts, we liked them, and we're publishing him!; this author just
happens to be young!

RB: Two or three months ago I received a short 7 or 8-page text
from someone I didn't know in the slightest, which was about
Chantal Akerman's *Rendez-vous d'Anna*.<fnref n="2" /> It took off from a very
understated line in the film. And this person had been so seduced
by this line that he had traced a corresponding delicate logic back
through the film. And I found this text extremely original, as it
reminded me of the way I'm often touched by films. But what
touched me the most is that in the email accompanying his text,
he wrote that he had been present at the meeting we had held at
Serge's bookseller's shop in the rue Traversière when *Trafic* was
set up, that he had been a subscriber to start with then had lost
contact with the journal as life went by. Then one day he had sent
us this text, *Trafic* being the only place he could send a text about
an unimportant line of dialogue at the origin of passion for a film.

<footnote n="1">1 Paul Choquet, "Personnages en quête de lumière. *En attendant les barbares* d'Eugène Green" ["Characters in search of light in Eugène Green's *Waiting for the Barbarians* (2017)"], *Trafic* 105 (Spring 2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Gabriel Franck, "S'il vous plaît—en pensant à Chantal Akerman, aux rendez-vous d'Anna" ["Please—thinking of Chantal Akerman, of Anna's rendezvous"] (1978), *Trafic* 110 (Summer 2019).</footnote>
**PR:** When I commission a text, I like to ask the author for a text that is sufficiently idiosyncratic and personal for him to say that he would not be able to publish it elsewhere than in *Trafic*. At the moment *Trafic* was created I was in three different places: at *Cahiers du cinéma* as an editor, at *Vertigo* (I edited an issue about cinematic letters), and at *Trafic*. At *Cahiers* cinema was talked about a great deal, all the time, and at *Vertigo* it was possible to conduct a project on a particular subject semi-autonomously. But *Trafic* was the kind of freedom you dream about; there was no editorial constraint even if there were real, high expectations.

**Question from Pierre Eugène [PE]:** Is there a notion of balance between texts about authors from the past and those who are opening onto something new—a new relationship to the image, new images...is this an important dimension for you?

**RB:** It is of course an important dimension, but it is implicit, and never really preconceived. If you pay attention, though, you notice that each issue contains a balance between contemporary concerns and theoretical problems, groups of texts on a particular filmmaker, etc.

**SP:** For the next issue,³ our idea is to investigate the question of conserving and restoring films, by looking into cinematheques, digital restoration, and broadcasting. We're asking for texts from people who have an eye in the past, the present, and the future, because it's a very urgent question: digital, analog, what are we doing? Raymond has coordinated this collection brilliantly, and it's a fine example of what you ask about.

**RB:** I had a first text I spoke to Patrice about, who suggested that more similar ones could be put with it. And in the end we have gathered a fine group of five texts by directors of archives
## The Making of the Journal

**RB:** To start with we had planned payment by the page. The first two issues of *Trafic* had sold so well that Serge even briefly entertained the idea of bimonthly publication. We quickly realized that this would be madness and that paying by the page would quickly bankrupt the journal. So we created the system of paying a single, modest fee for any text longer than ten pages, without any discrimination between authors.

**SP:** But within this economy, translators are paid by the page! We cannot ask too much of our publisher, but we negotiate with him and we have a network of excellent translators. We pay for the texts: I'm totally hostile to the idea of not paying authors at all for them, as if we were saying "consider yourself honored to be being published in *Trafic*..."⁴

**PR:** I'd like to go back to the question of democracy. It was a founding question in the early days of *Trafic*. We decided that all authors should be paid the same, whoever it was and however long their text. But another, typographical question also gave rise to real discussions among us and between us and Serge early on—the question of whether texts should be laid out in one or two columns per page. And we took the stance that all texts would be in one column, that there would be equality between them. There is of course a structure for the issues, with an introductory text sometimes requested from external authors, which we are fairly vigilant about. That's a text that we consider binds us all to *Trafic*.

**RB:** The monologic structure of *Trafic* (if we can call it that) is one of the things that makes the journal very difficult to put together.
Because we have no notes or images and a fixed number of pages (this is our commitment to the publisher) and we never cut the texts. On occasion we have had to completely reorganize an issue's Table of Contents because we couldn't get everything we wanted into it.

**PR:** The journal is difficult to put together particularly because of two sets of choices, one to do with policy, the other editorial: we can't use advertising (there is none, not even for other journals we think highly of) and we can't use illustrations either. Serge began with the idea that we would only illustrate "if necessary," which depended on what authors wanted. Sylvie, incidentally, wanted illustrations in the first issue. When Serge thought "if necessary," he was thinking very precisely of Godard's *Letter to Jane* published in *Tel Quel* 52 (1972), which had published the text of the voice-over and reproduced the photo of Jane Fonda in Hanoï as a thumbnail image on each page. This kind of idea excited Serge: his desire was that the writing itself should reproduce the temporality of the shots, the scenes and so on. The text by Godard called "La paroisse morte" [The dead parish] that appears several times across the first issue of *Trafic* is rather like the *Letter to Jane* photo in *Tel Quel*. Serge had sacrificed many things for *Trafic* and had very precise ideas about what it should be, but when I suggested to him that not illustrating was a stronger stance to take than a few measly photos in a few texts, he could understand the advice.

## The *Trafic* Collection

**PR:** The collection arose from a desire of Paul Otchakovskylaurens as a possible extension of what was being done at *Trafic*. He has always kept final cut on books, whose titles we suggested to him (I'm not talking here about Daney's *La Maison cinéma et le monde* volumes, a title chosen by him and Jean-Claude Biette). I suggested a certain number of American authors to Otchakovskylaurens, such as Manny Farber, whom I already wanted to publish
236 in *Cahiers du cinéma*, and who was very complicated to translate. A lot of translators ran away, until Brice Matthieussent, a literary translator, agreed to do it. Raymond published his book *L'Entre-Images 2*, then Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mark Rappaport in the collection, which has produced about two books per year.

**Question from PE:** To go back to the very early days, Serge Daney brought together in extremis a project he had thought about a great deal but which he knew would last. But the surprising thing is that it has lasted so long.

**PR:** It has lasted because *Trafic* was very well conceived by Serge initially. The balance between the attention to contemporary issues and to cinema history was the real principle of how *Trafic*'s contents were organized. Carrying on in the same way was enough. The only change was related to each issue's introductory text, and I think we were intelligent enough not to want to take Daney's place, and to rotate authorship of this introductory text by appealing to people who really wanted to tackle cinema's present. Serge was also a very pragmatic person. Something he always used to say was "the succession of a journal has to be taken." He had the desire to do something of historical importance, but his books also mattered. He was extremely demanding when putting together his own collections; the editing of his texts was the guiding principle of each book. The *Persévérance* project was quite different, thanks to Serge Toubiana who helped him to carry it out differently. It's true that where *Trafic* is concerned, we said to one another that we felt obliged to carry on even if he had given up on the book project. He gave us the weapons to carry on, and we have had an extraordinary publisher. Without the greatness and loyalty of P.O.L. a project like *Trafic* would not have been born and would not have lasted. When Serge suggested it to other publishers it wasn't accepted.
On Current Events

**Question from PE:** Something struck me at the time of the issue of around 11 September 2001, and especially the cover photo which was not from a film but from TV news. I'm wondering what state of mind you were in at that time: did you want to cover current affairs or take the time to understand them?

**RB:** We were lucky enough to have an American author called Kent Jones who was in New York on 9/11 and who had the intelligence and imagination to write a text which was of course inspired by that day's events, but which undertook an archaeology of them from inside American cinema itself. An American photographer was close to giving us an image free of charge, but his agency wasn't willing, so we made do with a more conventional image. In this way we did treat this burning topic of the time, a harrowing and all-consuming one for cinema.

**SP:** I wrote a text about 9/11 whose title was a sort of Anglo-French play on words: "would this God who injures some bless others?" A play on words not intended to make people laugh, of course. I watched the television news in horror, like everyone else. The shock was worldwide, and it was relayed largely by shocking images, about which the least we can say is that they were unprecedented and constituted an audiovisual as well as a geopolitical event. It was a totally unique audiovisual event, terribly upsetting, a real-life fiction. We're not slaves to current events in *Trafic*, but we are necessarily connected to them. And where strictly cinema-related current events are concerned, we like to be attentive to them. Current events were one of Serge's priorities. Getting ready to write about a big retrospective or a big festival is good. But we prefer the notion of presentness [*présent*] to current events [*l'actualité*], because presentness looks both back and forward at the same time. And so we are sympathetic to all work that can take account of evolving work on today's audiovisual matters.
238 **RB:** And sometimes we have strokes of luck. An example is when I saw Philippe Grandrieux's *Sombre* at the Locarno festival, wrote an essay that came out in the December issue, and the film came out in Paris on 15 December.

**MU:** There's something else about current events [*'actualité*]: the idea of afterwardsness, of looking again. Having the time to return to things and see them again puts you more in the present [*présent*] than in current events. As everything—film releases, festivals—is going faster and faster, there's the idea of putting things into perspective.

**RB:** On the road you sometimes see that lovely sign that says "slow down, work in progress." This is *Trafic*'s motto.

*Translated into English by Kate Ince*
<figure><img src="image_28.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_29.png" /></figure>
DIGITAL DANey
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /></figure>
Serge Daney's death in the summer of 1992 occurred just as the internet and mobile phones, two major technological upheavals that have connected people worldwide as part of a global digital network, were about to emerge. Increasing democratization of video, photographic, and sound recording tools took place over the same period, hugely developing the capacity to watch and to share subjective visions of the world. Although he died too early to analyze it fully, Daney wrote a lot about the accelerated mediatization of our lives through television and publicity, as well as the important changes these media made to the creation and perception of cinema. These issues have reconfigured cinema and its ways of expression in the contemporary digital era, and the three essays in this section aim to (re)think them "after Daney."

Pierre Eugène
TELEVISION

MACHINES

ROBOTS

COMPUTER

POST-MODERNITY
# Serge Daney and the Robots

Pierre Eugène

By reviewing a number of Serge Daney's articles, this essay looks at how the critic experienced with computerization in the 1980s, notably at his workplace, the newspaper *Libération*. It considers the notions of computers, machines, robots, and computer-generated images in relation to changes in the status of cinematographic and televisual images during the 1980s-1990s—and our own relationship as viewers to images, characters, and reality.

## A Dedication

The readers of Serge Daney who have looked at his book *Le Salaire du Zappeur* ("The Zapper's Wages"; Daney 1993a) may have wondered about the dedication of the book: "To Mister Atex."
246 Who is this man? Not a human being in fact, but a computer; or rather: a complete computer system, including a large central unit (today we would say a "server") to which a myriad of small independent terminals were connected, into which the reporters of the newspaper *Libération*, from 1986, would type their texts directly, which would then be sent directly to photocomposition. This system, called "ATEX," created by a subsidiary of Kodak, began to be used in the early 1980s in the American press. It was quickly adopted by *Libération*—always in search of innovative solutions and economic aims—which envisaged it as a means of eliminating, over time, the long and expensive process of unautomated production, but also of receiving news agency dispatches and articles by journalists sent abroad with small portable computers (the Tandy 200) through a modem connection.<fnref n="1" /> The first tests began in September 1986 in the Lyon edition of the newspaper and the practice was extended to the whole company when the Parisian head office moved to a new address at the end of July 1987. This IT transition was not without difficulties, and Daney's dedication to "Mr. Atex" could be an amused (if not ironic) echo of the consequent technological upheaval that cannot have facilitated the daily life of the newspaper.

In addition to this wink of complicity to his colleagues at *Libération*, the dedication of *Le Salaire du Zappeur* undoubtedly takes another sense in this collection intended to republish the major part of a column with the same title by Daney in *Libération*, which he wrote every day (except Sunday) between September 14 and December 24, 1987, about the mythologies, the effects, and the bestiary<fnref n="2" /> of French television, which was then in full expansion.<fnref n="3" />

<footnote n="1">1 On this subject: Guisnel 1999, 242-44.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 A long analysis of this column can be found in Joubert-Laurencin 1988.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 The three channels of French television were entirely under state control before 1981. François Mitterrand, elected in 1981, allowed the creation of private radio and television channels: the fourth channel (Canal+) was created in 1984, the fifth (La Cinq) in 1986, the sixth as well as local and cable channels in 1987. Also in 1987, the first channel (TF1) was privatized.</footnote>
This column would be published in a paperback, under the same
title, in 1988.

Looking at television with "cinema's eyes," Daney organized his
interest in the small screen around three main areas of interest.
First the aesthetic and "market shares" competition between
television and cinema in the field of images. Second, the fact that
television was a privileged place of observing French political
and social life, as well as a glimpse of the French vision of the
world: debates about ideas, the treatment of information, the
appearance of speakers or men of power, the "democratic" vision
of people on the screen. Finally, television interested Daney in
the way it reconfigured the division between public and private,
outside and inside: how the world network of the "global village"
(theorized by Marshall Mac Luhan) had echoes with the private
life of a consumer of images "at home."

In this sense, the dedication to "Mr. Atex" is Daney's under-
standing of the increasingly massive incursion of information
technologies into the private, intimate, but also professional life
of individuals, transforming their perceptions of life. To per-
sonalize the computer, to give it a "Mr.," was to recognize that
people would quickly have to "deal" with these technologies; and
also that the generalized mediatization, which had inscribed the
small screens in homes, now affected the professional world, as
well as—undoubtedly an essential point—the intimate activity of
writing. Writing on a computer is kind of a farewell to the materi-
ality of handwriting (even the typewriter included the materiality
of the sheets of paper). From now on, articles would be written
on the screen of a word processor (Libération's was called "Le
Rédacteur": "The Editor") and immediately networked through the
ATEX system. This "other" screen of writing, which did not belong
to cinema or television, but to a third party, the computer, was
not long in imposing its considerable role.

Daney was more melancholic than nostalgic. He never rejected
the era in which he lived, but kept a fundamental distance, a
248 "memorialist's" gaze at the events of his time, without really participating in them. Working at a newspaper, directly connected to all kinds of news, Daney not only experimented with the technological developments in his office, but also was kept informed of all innovations. Some of his articles echo scientific events, the awarding of Nobel Prizes or the parascientific debates around the "memory of water," for example (Daney 1997).<fnref n="4" /> Traveling light and owning only a few things himself in his Parisian apartment (according to testimonies), Daney did not have a fetish for technology and very little appetite for gadgets. At the end of his life, his mobility severely impacted by AIDS, he equipped himself only with a *nec-plus-ultra* Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and a television set. Arlette Bonaud, Serge Daney's cousin, told me about his difficulties with electronic devices. She recalled in particular an answering machine that Daney couldn't get to work, and which he finally threw away. These difficulties may have been overcome with computers, because in addition to his articles for *Libération*, Daney wrote from day to day, between 1988 and 1991, various small texts on a personal computer: ideas, drafts of articles, intimate accounts and self-analysis, reading notes and various lists: all kinds of notes that he used to write by hand in the many intimate notebooks that followed him everywhere, in Paris or on trips.

"Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts," wrote Nie-tzsche in a letter (quoted by Kittler 1999, 200). We don't know exactly how the computer "changed" Daney's writing. But the computer, undeniably, is a sedentary, cumbersome, unwieldy tool, a tool for the home or the office, not for the street or for light travel. It can then be opposed to the notebooks of a declared walker and traveler, notebooks of all formats and styles (school notebooks from all over the world, diaries, bound notebooks...) that had accompanied Daney since his adolescence on all his

<footnote n="4">4 "Le cinéma et la mémoire de l'eau", originally published in *Libération*, December 29, 1989.</footnote>
peregrinations. Daney started writing personally on a computer shortly after his “Salaire du zappeur” column in *Libération*. Hence, perhaps, another meaning of the dedication: after having written on the “small screen,” the meeting with “Mr. Atex” would have engaged him to write directly on another “small” screen. And if the typewriter can be qualified as a “miniature printing press” (Hubertus Streicher quoted by Kittler 1999, 22), Daney’s intimate writings on the computer repeat in miniature his writings at *Libération*; they take over from them as well as being their destiny. In the computer writings, the *marginalia* (drawings, calligraphy essays, and theoretical sketches) that sometimes adorned his old notebooks disappear, as the computer only records *printable text*. P.O.L. Editions would print these computer notes of Daney’s in 1993, finding after his death the diskettes on which he had recorded his notes and publishing these under the title *L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur* (Daney 1993b). In this title chosen posthumously by Jean-Claude Biette from a line in Fritz Lang’s *Moonfleet* (1955), a film that Daney loved, the “Monsieur” here is not supposed to be “Mister Atex,” but Jeremy Fox, to whom little John Mohune is speaking.

## “Chose” and “Machin”

In 1983, Daney dedicated his first book, *La Rampe* (Daney 1983), as follows: “Pour Chose et Machin” (“For Thing and Thingy”). In the first of the two terms, the “Chose,” one can hear the Lacanian “Thing” (“Das Ding”), the unconscious, and at the same time the “real” object (in the Lacanian sense) which insists in perception without one being able to grasp, to understand, or to assimilate it; the “Machin” (word derived from “machine”), on the other hand, is a rather trivial object: a gadget, a machine. Both *chose* or *machin* can designate a person in French, and we also use “machin chose” to designate someone whose name we have forgotten. In the first edition of the book, which includes several pages of film photographs next to the texts, one can find an illustration of “Chose” and “Machin.” The top of the page (Daney
250 1983, 23) shows the two strange twins from Tod Browning's *Freaks* (1932); at the bottom of the page, in the same symmetrical posture, in mirror image, two cosmonauts in the spaceship of Stanley Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968). Above: two "freaks," two *unheimlich* bodies caught in the "originary world of impulses," in relationship with the "naturalism" that Gilles Deleuze evokes in *The Movement-Image* (Deleuze 1983, 133). Underneath, Kubrick's "thingy," clean and technological. Between the two images, between the 1932 film and the 1968 film, the history of cinema unfolds. We can see the passage from the burlesque, trivial, circus-like age of early cinema (which was the argument of so many of Browning's films) to the modern, intellectual and technological age of the 1960s and after<fnref n="5" />. In Daney's work Godard is perhaps the filmmaker who best questions these two trends. One thus finds in *Numéro deux* (also evoked by Daney in *La Rampe*) both the "obscene" part of the body and the technical procedures needed to capture them (a recording and video studio; Godard names it in his film, saying "*machin, machines*"). Also in *Numéro deux*, Godard prints sentences on the screen with a computer, which we can see reproduced on another page of *La Rampe* (Daney 1983, 79), printing a photogram of the film, a real piece of film roll.

The "machin" and the "machine" are without doubt the strongest signs of modernity for Daney. In his texts from the 1960s to the 1970s, the word "machine" is implied first of all in the "production machines," Hollywood being the first of all. Then, at the beginning of the 1980s, he evokes (Daney 1983, 157-63)<fnref n="6" /> some small French author-producers (notably Éric Rohmer, Paul Vecchiali...) who invented their own means of financing and directing their films by making themselves production "machines" (Les Films du Losange

<footnote n="5">5 In a postcard to his mother (Anvers, Belgium, July 17th, 1980) representing two orycteropes (very strange animals), Daney wrote at the back: "have you recognized Chose & Machin? It's them!"</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 "Le cru et le cuit.", originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 323-24, May, 1981.</footnote>
for Rohmer, Diagonale productions for Vecchiali). "Machines" must also be understood in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's "desiring-machines" in *Anti-Oedipus* (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Under Daney's pen, at the end of the 1970s, humanity is divided between the mechanical (*machin*) and the animal body (*chose*). According to Daney, Jacques Tati created a type of comic character based on the fact "that there is no longer any human peculiarity" (Daney 1983, 117);<fnref n="7" /> man becomes partly a thing among things, a quasi virtual figure. Bresson, for his part, shows in his "models" what links them to the "mechanical": "What's modernity in cinema? At the time of [World] war [II], the decision of some filmmakers to follow the human body and its activities in their *mechanical becoming*. Any action undertaken is dedicated to its 'unfolding' which implies reflex, repetition, *automaton*, in short: the non-human at the heart of the human. The human specificity is the exit of this 'becoming', it is the signifying rupture: miracle, encounter, salvation, event. It is undoubtedly Bresson who had the most exact awareness of this: the 'devil's share' is the share of the machine, of the machinic (as opposed to the 'game')." Bresson, playing on unthinking human gestures, puts on screen characters conceived as human automatons.

## A Synthetic Reality

One of the central questions in Daney's articles during the 1980s is precisely that of the cinematic character. It resonates with the question of the "individual," this new being, an effect of the new age of capitalism and marketing. What is a character, a cinema character? wonders Daney, who finds in his articles "enchants," "identikit," incarnations of actors, but stumbles on this untraceable figure of the character, which would emerge from the actor and distinguish itself from his "role" as written in the screenplay. A few months before his death, the idea of character

<footnote n="7">7 "Éloge de Tati.", originally published in *Cahiers du cinéma* 303, September, 1979.</footnote>
252 will be the explicit subject of his second article in *Trafic* (Daney 1992).

In a famous article from 1981 on *Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo* (Uli Edel, 1981), which dates from his arrival at *Libération*, Daney draws out the difference between character and “Identikit”— which is called in French *portrait-robot*, “robot-portrait.” The film is an adaptation of Christiane Felscherinow’s autobiographical story, that of a young girl who fell into drugs and prostitution. Speaking of the main character, Daney writes:

> What’s the use of the real Christiane F.? It was enough to put all the literature on the subject into a computer, from the confessions of former drug addicts to the confessions of drug dealers, not to mention the police files and medical reports, *to obtain* Christiane F, the harmless little girl of thirteen, the identikit [*portrait-robot*] of a fallen child, the sociological sample we needed to illustrate the standard scenario, the robot scenario of the film” (Daney 1998, 33).⁸

The “robot” is to be understood as that which constructs a character *from the outside*. If Daney speaks of a creation by “computer,” it is because the character of Christiane F in the film is a representation formed from *information*, from *data*—just as an avatar or a pure virtual reality creation are created from programmed codes. An identikit also keeps a resonance of the police, thus the threat of an “art police.” Between the character and the code, it is the whole range of the unforeseen, of what escapes the code that disappears. A “real” character embodied in an actor’s body should surprise, go beyond his sociological profile, make him more ambiguous, gain through the filmmaker’s mise en scène a “margin of indeterminacy” (as Bresson would say).

What Daney observes throughout the 1980s, and in particular through television, is the emergence of an increasingly coded cinema, with a simplified grammar, and for the spectator, the
recognition of "sociological" clichés for constructing identities that are always formatted. The most representative filmmaker of this type of film is Jean-Jacques Annaud. Daney describes him as a "post-cinematographer, that is, one who knows nothing of what cinema has known" (Daney 2015, 156).<fnref n="9" /> That is to say, he knows nothing of the capacity of cinema to record, *nolens volens*, things that cannot be mastered, coded, or decoded. Daney devoted one of his very last texts in *Libération*, a few months before his death, to *L'Amant* (1992; the adaptation of the novel by Marguerite Duras). In this dark, violently polemical and somewhat desperate article, Daney writes of Annaud that he is "in fact, not just anyone, but the first non-cinephile robot in the history of cinema. One feels ... that he will always know what it should look like, the 'rendering' of human behavior and emotions. But that's all he knows: he has the knowledge of a robot who doesn't know that he doesn't know everything" (Daney 2015, 157). Criticizing the system of a film that asks the spectator to "initial" each of the images it shows him, a film that sells each of the objects and beings contained in the film as in an advertisement to a "poor spectator-decoder," Daney ends up questioning Annaud's filming in Vietnam: "what risk was he running that his camera, for a moment, might record by chance a few grams of reality that was not pre-made?" But, concludes Daney: "In the age of synthetic images and emotions, the chances of an encounter with reality have become quite minimal" (Daney 2015, 160).

About Luc Besson and the success of *Le Grand Bleu* (1988), Daney writes in his notes to *L'Exercice*: "The future is always a certain mutation of the image, a becoming of the image, a technological redefinition. So let's say that Besson's cinema, from the beginning, is a cinema of the time when the idea ... of the computer-generated image makes all the other images fall into the past" (Daney 1993b, 358). Besson would have public success

<footnote n="9">9 "Lire notre critique ci-dessous.", originally published in *Libération*, March 31, 1992.</footnote>
254 because it would anticipate the synthetic becoming, the loss of real inscription of every image. Daney adds:

> The synthetic image is an image that does not come from the gaze (print what one has seen) but where the gaze comes afterwards (sees what has been printed, “what it gives”). ...
> It is because he [Besson] raises the technique of shooting ... to an impressive level that we are grateful to him for producing a fundamentally synthetic image of the world. The Besson effect would not exist if ... we showed [*exhibait*] the capacity of computers to produce images comparable to those of the cinema. (Daney 1993b, 358)

It is the “unsynthetic” reality that interests Daney, who has always confessed his lack of interest in (more than his aversion to) a cinema that would stray too far from the recording of cinema: animation cinema, computer-generated-imagery, mannerist or overly formalist films, experimental cinema... This personal disinterest in these types of cinema did not prevent him from publishing texts in *Trafic* about these domains, nor from twice receiving on his radio program Microfilms Philippe Quéau, director of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel between 1977 and 1996, and a promoter and theorist of computer-generated-imagery (then in full development). Quéau was also one of the pioneers of the Internet in France, developing one of the first French web servers. Writing on television in *Le Salaire du Zappeur*, Daney refuses the easy opposition between cinema and television, noting that the great filmmakers, the inventors of forms, also made links to a “history of communication”: “the real impact of filmmakers like Vertov, Rossellini, Bresson, Tati, Welles, Godard, or Straub (among others) was their unstable situation between the poetic requirements of cinema and the progress of the mass-mediatization of the world” (Daney 1993a, 186–87). But they used their reflection on media in their own medium: to transform it, deconstruct it. As far as television is concerned, it’s another story.
During a trip to Japan in December 1982, at the time the country of advanced technology and gadgets, Daney wrote a series of columns for *Libération* evoking the specificities of Japanese culture (from manga to cinema, from the red-light district to *kawaii*). Arriving in Osaka, Daney writes that the city looks like "the museum of everything that has been invented, attempted, taken up, failed, copied, quoted, and re-cited in terms of urban décor since the war" (Daney 2002, 646)<fnref n="10" />. He describes the city as a "dictionary of quotations" of a decor that "does not quote anything, it does not celebrate anything, it has forgotten what it quoted: it is a decor, it is a simulacrum." Five years later, writing about the figure of city in cinema, Daney recalls Osaka and remarks that "Japanese films resemble Japanese comics (manga), because they are cross-linked, framed, fetishized, drawn to the point of disgust. ... Any human being with a camera brings back a reasonable harvest of pre-framed images, focused on signals and fetishes, visual operating instructions, living prayers for insertion. Japanese postmodern space (the hallucinating journey from Tokyo to Narita, for example) is *over-marked*" (Daney 2012, 282).<fnref n="11" /> The "post-modern" city is already an image for the tourist, who can find nothing original in it, only "pre-framed" images, a set of exposed signs, suitable only for decoding. During his trip to Japan in December 1982, Daney also tested a capsule hotel, and described the experience of watching television in the miniaturized box: "Until two in the morning, a few hundred yen slipped into the television slot are the sad cord that umbilically connects the small capsule to the great Japan. Everything is small: colored corpuscles play baseball, ... miniaturized announcers smile indulgently" (Daney 2002a, 650).

Through these various examples, one understands that Japan, the postmodern and technological country itself, is undoubtedly the place par excellence of the *screen*. "Screen" in the sense that

<footnote n="10">10 "Osaka, sublime mocheté.", originally published in *Libération*, December 18, 1982.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 "Ville-ciné et télé-banlieue.", originally published in Grenier 1987.</footnote>
256 Daney gives to this term in December 1988 in an interview, at the time of the publication of *Le Salaire du Zappeur*: "We are in the culture of the screen, not of the image. There are screens everywhere, but the screen does not necessarily imply the image. It implies it only as far as it is easy to decipher" (Le Grignou 1988). He adds that "the screen of the television is a shop window, one passed from representation to presentation." In Japan there are omnipresent televisual screens, but also a "city-screen" whose profusion of (advertising) signs crushes and hides individualities, preventing any encounter with an ambiguous reality and unforeseen characters.

## Solitude of the Viewer

This technological modernity, such as Daney analyzes it in his trip to Japan or in the evolution of television in France, has another point in common as well as the problem of coding and decoding: the solitude of the spectators, abandoning the public cinema for the private home space of the television (even if Daney does not directly make this parallel). In the afterword to *Le Salaire du Zappeur*, he remarks:

> It appeared to me at first that all that was hateful on TV had a common point. Dispensers of 'culture' or entertaining hosts ... made us feel that without them, we would be nothing. They made us feel that real life was no longer 'elsewhere' ... They made pass for greatness of soul and concern for the other the monopoly that television has on the solitude undergone by its viewers. (Daney 1993a, 187)

In the capsule hotel in Osaka, Daney talks about that "sad cord that umbilically connects the small capsule to the great Japan" and a televisual world where everything is reduced, miniaturized, adapted to an *individual* scale, far from the great collective seizures of the cinema. In his notes to *L'Exercice*, Daney describes this historical evolution: "If the person was a node of forces in a network, man a circle with a core and a periphery, the individual
[that of the 1980s] is a kind of faceted polyhedron, exposed
in more facets to more stimuli from outside, capable of more
connections but *more superficial*. Our world is more super-
ficial because *there are more surfaces that are all interfaces*. The
heart is bald, the core not hard but empty (this would be the
nipponization of our cultures)” (Daney 1993b, 172). The screen is
a surface which becomes an interface, on which the spectators
*project* their own tropisms, but they do not receive anything from
the outside, if not *recognized* codes.

Images without Bodies

Writing about John Badham's *War Games* (1984), Daney evokes
the loneliness of the teenager in the film, a budding hacker who
unknowingly starts off a thermonuclear war. Daney compares
him to the hero played by Cary Grant in Hitchcock's *North by
Northwest* and ends his article on his 1980s alter ego, a "kid who
knows how to do everything, a snoop who has become a ferret,
always capable of fixing his own escape" (Daney 2002, 206).<fnref n="12" />
It is the solitude of this teenager hungry for video games and
computer manipulation (more than for television or cinema) that
makes this teenager the new spectator of the 1980s.

We can see in this film how the young hero has no body and how
the computer in his bedroom can be assimilated to masturbation.
We learn in one scene that he does not know how to swim, while
his high school classmate, who flirts with him, is very athletic.
In *L'Exercice*, Daney writes out a quote from a book by Marc
Guillaume, *La Contagion des passions, essai sur l'exotisme intérieur*:

Interfaces, screens, and more generally prostheses (of
language, knowledge, intelligence) take charge of the spectral
individual, dispensing him from bodily presence and con-
sequently from the rituals that regulate the confrontations of

<footnote n="12">12 "War Games: Guerre et puce.", originally published in *Libération*, December 14, 1983.</footnote>
bodies, enabling him to avoid committing the totality of his personality in exchanges with others ... The elision of a part of the being is what allows ... easier connections.

When Daney was chronicling television in *Le Salaire du Zappeur*, he was interested in an announcer entirely made up of computer-generated images, who first appeared in the United Kingdom: Max Headroom, who presented a program of musical clips. "There are dogs to guard houses, why shouldn't there be image robots to announce programs and tell the news?" (Daney 1993a, 145)<fnref n="13" />. In fact, added Daney, since "the traditional image of the human body is so little exalted by the small screen ... it is perhaps reasonable to leave it to the cinema (or to the great occasions of live recording) and to switch resolutely towards images" (Daney 1993a, 146). Images become autonomous, outside the human world, managing the images themselves. Daney had this formidable prescience, I think, of what would become computer algorithms governing our relationship to images for several years (on social networks or Google, for example): "Just as, for a long time, machines have replaced us (without causing great suffering), it is also possible to imagine images that would do the housework in our stead in the world of images" (Daney 1993a, 146).

## Ecology of Images

A vision of an autonomous world of the pure, synthetic image, definitively distant from the human world. But is this really possible? A passage from *L'Exercice* has always fascinated me, because Daney evokes the Internet before it existed. Reacting to an article published in *Libération*, Daney writes: "The connection, via the telephone and the computer, of all people with all other people is less and less unimaginable. Someone will be able to fax

<footnote n="13">13 "Mac Headroom, créature télévisuelle.", originally published in *Libération*, November 26, 1987.</footnote>
his diary from a favela in São Paulo more easily than he will be
admitted to the presence of the powerful of this world, or to the
management of his living conditions. In the same way that tele-
vision has been considered as a substitute good, an enchantment
of the world for the underprivileged, general communication
can very well be considered as a hypnotic-entertainment rattle
that allows the poor to inhabit—even—the world" (Daney 1993b,
338–39). The article Daney mentioned, written by François Ascher
(Professor at the French Institute of Urbanism), evokes how in
a world entirely governed by "virtual" information, real pres-
ence could become a social and financial value: "The possibility
of seeing and hearing each other without intermediaries, but
also of touching, smelling, tasting will designate real wealth, and
will define the new social and geographical inequalities" (Asher
1991). What is interesting is precisely that François Ascher is not a
specialist of media or computing, but an urban planner. He thinks
of social interactions in relation to the territory, to the concrete
landscape. And indeed, the interface promised by the networks,
as Daney notes it, is not fundamentally different from television
reception (and we could think of the way western citizens experi-
enced the health crisis in 2020 and 2021: looking at screens). In
his last article at the end of his "Le Salaire du zappeur" column,
Daney referred to television in terms of ecology: "it should be
possible to say that we live in houses that have water, gas, elec-
tricity, and image. ... The water (one says) is more or less pure,
good, or chlorinated. This is the central question of television
and it is more a question of ecology than anything else" (Daney
1993a, 183).<fnref n="14" /> The question that Daney bequeaths to us is this one:
who manages our environment of images politically, with the
codes and the signs that they carry? Daney's column on television
should be reread freshly to question the Internet. There, he inter-
rogates more than the quality of images: he also questions the

<footnote n="14">14 "En attendant la neige.", originally published in *Libération*, December 24,
1987.</footnote>
relationships that we weave with them and the way we are in the
middle of images.

*Translated into English by Pierre Eugène and Kate Ince*

References

Asher, François. 1991. "Villes: le paradoxe des télécommunications." *Libération*, June 4.

Daney, Serge. 1983. *La Rampe*. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard
1992. "Journal de l'an nouveau." *Trafic* 2: 5-18.

1993a. *Le Salaire du zappeur*. Paris: P.O.L (first edition 1988. Paris: Ramsay).

1993b. L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur. Paris: P.O.L.

1997. Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à mains. Lyon: Aléas. (first edition 1991).

1998. *Ciné journal, vol. 1, 1981-1982*. Paris: Cahiers du cinema.

2002. *La Maison cinéma et le monde: Les années Libé (1981-1985)*. Paris: P.O.L.

2012. *La Maison cinéma et le monde: Les années Libé (1986-1991)*. Paris: P.O.L.

2015. *La Maison cinéma et le monde: Le moment Trafic (1991-1992)*. Paris: P.O.L.

Grenier, Lise (ed.). 1987. *Cités-Cinés*. Paris: Grande Halle de la Vilette & Ramsay.

Guisnel, Jean. 1999. *Libération, la biographie*. Paris: La Découverte.

Kittler, Fredrich. 1999. *Gramophone, Film, Typewriter*. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles 1986. *Cinema 1: The Movement-Image*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1983. *Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Joubert-Laurencin, Hervé. 1988. "Dictionnaire des idées zappées." *Vertigo* 2: 137-50.

Le Grignou, Brigitte. 1989. "Entretien avec Serge Daney, Libération." *Quaderni* 8: 87-93.
<figure><img src="image_31.png" /></figure>
VIDEOGRAPHIC CRITICISM

SPECTATORIAL MEMORY

CINEMA EXPERIENCE

FEAR AND TRAUMA
# A Video Exploration of a Viewer's Account: *L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney*

Chloé Galibert-Lainé

This article reflects on the production of a videographic essay exploring and responding to Serge Daney's text "The Eye Was in the Tomb and Stared at Franju." I argue that transposing Daney's written memory of Franju's *Eyes Without a Face* onto the screen offers an original and sensitive way to access the practice of criticism and the multiple temporalities which it encompasses, all the while exploring in a performative way the gap which always exists between a film and the manner in which it is remembered. I also show how creating the audiovisual essay helped me to break out of the sole analysis of Daney's text to reflect more generally on the different ways this text can be read today.
264 On September 25th, 1986, Serge Daney published a short text in *Libération* entitled "L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Franju" (reprinted in Daney 2012, 145-47) in which he discussed his memory of Georges Franju's *Les Yeux sans visage* (1960). It was common for Daney to write about films that were not current. More than critiquing new releases, he liked to observe, through a retrospective, a TV rerun, or a new cinema release (as was the case for *Les Yeux sans visage*), how the films he had enjoyed survived (or did not survive) the passing of time. Some of his most touching texts were born of out this attention paid to what happened to films from his past. A good example of this is the melancholy incipit of his "Journal de l'an passé," in which he discusses Michael Curtiz's *Robin Hood* (2015, 53-82)<fnref n="1" /> as Kevin Costner announced his intention to make a remake. Or the more cheerful dialogues in which he stages himself in conversation with different films as if they were old friends.<fnref n="2" />

"L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Franju" fits into this corpus of new critiques of old films. Contrary to the previous examples however, its aim was not to determine if Franju's film had suffered from the passing of time (the question gets answered right away, and the answer is no). It is Daney's opportunity to share his personal memory of the film that he had kept for twenty-six years and, on the occasion of the film's re-release, to confront his memory of it with what is actually on the film roll. Some interesting questions arise due to this essay's status as a "memory text."<fnref n="3" /> To what extent can a film be distorted in viewers' minds over the years as it takes root in their memories and gets entangled with their own personal stories? At the cost of what compromises and approximations can writing about a film grasp

<footnote n="1">1 It was originally published in *Trafic* 1, Winter 1991, pp. 5-30.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 See, for instance, the dialogue between Daney and Vincente Minnelli's *Celui par qui le scandale arrive*, reprinted in *La maison cinéma et le monde* 3: 163-65.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 I borrow this term from Annette Kuhn's *An Everyday Magic*, which is an essential methodological reference to analyze a corpus of cinema viewers' memories.</footnote>
a past viewing experience? And what can reading these accounts provoke in viewers from a different generation, who probably have a different relationship to cinema?

To explore Daney's text, I used an experimental method inspired by work that has been conducted for several years in the field of "videographic research" in cinema studies.<fnref n="4" /> This research practice consists in studying films, not only by describing them and analyzing them on paper, but by putting them back on the editing table and producing a video analysis. This allows the film medium to be explored endogenously, and reduces the distance between the study and the object studied in a productive way (a distance that was discussed by Raymond Bellour in his 1975 article "Le texte introuvable"<fnref n="5" />). According to Catherine Grant, one of the pioneers in this field, this practice comes directly from Brad Haseman's proposal in his "Manifesto for Performative Research" (2006). Haseman invited his readers to adopt in their research "the same medium or the same mode as the object of their research; that is to say, in the case of films, television, audiovisual art, or internet videos, [to conduct their research] *audiovisually*" (Grant 2016). Pushing this reasoning even further, I wanted to explore Daney's experience as a viewer in a performative way, by producing a new viewing experience for a contemporary audience, which would shed a critical light onto Daney's account and make each viewer reflect on their own memory mechanisms. This research led me to create a ten-minute-long audiovisual essay entitled *L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney* (Galibert-Lainé 2017).

In this article, I propose to return to the creation of this film, concentrating on the different ways of studying a corpus of viewers' accounts. What emerged from this video exploration of

<footnote n="4">4 The website [in]Transition, edited by Catherine Grant, Chiara Grizzaffi, Christian Keathley, and Drew Morton, is one of the most complete resources on this topic at the moment: http://mediacommmons.org/intransition/resources (all the links were accessed on 10 July 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 Originally published in *Ça cinéma 2* (7-8), May 1975.</footnote>
266 Daney's account regarding how viewers' memory works and the stakes of creating accounts of cinema's memories? This article will have two parts. First, I will argue that transposing a viewer's account onto the screen offers an original and sensitive way to access the practice of criticism and the multiple temporalities it encompasses, all the while exploring in a performative way the gap that always exists between a film and the manner in which it is remembered. Then, I will show how creating this audiovisual essay helped me to break out of the analysis of Daney's text to reflect more generally on the different ways this text can be read today. This will lead me to present the videographic approach as a way to bring back the memory account into a double present: both the present experienced during the screening and the present of our contemporary era, in which it is important to keep alive the memory of these accounts and the films they refer to—because archiving and studying past viewing practices can help to understand present and future viewing experiences.

Exploring the Multiple Temporalities of
Memory Accounts through Film

In his diary, which was published posthumously under the title
*L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*, Serge Daney wrote:

Things imprint themselves twice: once on the film roll and
once in the viewer. ... There is the roll's developing time
(rushes) and the time it takes for the film to mature in the
body and nervous system of a viewer in the dark. It might
be this relationship to time which allows for some people
(including me) to go from passively watching a film to actively
writing about it. ... Writing is acknowledging what has already
been written. In the film (films being an organized sediment
of signs) and in me (organized by a sediment of mnemic
traces which, over time, constitute my story). Before: one
is written (worked on). After: one is writing (working). Thus,
writing is unwriting (rewriting with visible ink on invisible ink). (1993, 20–21)

This very rich passage deserves to be analyzed in more detail
than this article allows. What I am most interested in is the
way Daney insists on the importance of the *time* spent "in the
dark." The viewers' "exposure time" to the film (to extend the
photographic metaphor) would be what makes an impression on
their mind and imprints the film in their memory. According to
Daney, this length of time is the condition for recollection to be
possible, and thus for critique to be possible. But if we re-read
the paragraph carefully, we can see that at least four different
temporalities are evoked, and the relations between them are far
from being resolved. First, there is what Daney calls "the time of
the film" (1999, 82), which corresponds to the actual length of the
film roll. This time is immutable, metronomic, fixed forever at the
time that the film was edited. There is also the time that viewers
experience when watching the film. This "dream time" can cor-
respond very closely or very loosely to the "time of the film." With
a film, "which confuses the art of editing shots together with
the art of creating time" (Daney 1999, 82),<fnref n="6" /> the time measured
by the clock in the cinema auditorium and the time experienced
during the screening by the viewers will be very similar, whereas,
watching a film, "which manages to have time on its side" (Daney
1999, 82), objective and experienced time can differ enormously.
Then, there is the time that occurs between viewing the film
and recalling and writing about it. This period of time can span
a few hours for the critic who needs to send his text back right
after the end of the screening—or several years. Here, Daney
only briefly touches on the various metamorphoses that the film
can go through while maturing like this "within" the viewers, but
elsewhere he did describe these transformations very precisely.<fnref n="7" />

<footnote n="6">6 Daney uses this expression about *La Vérité sur Bébé Donge* (Henri Decoin, 1952).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 *L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur* is very rich material to do research on this as the reader can observe how the memory of some films evolves page after page, nearly day by day.</footnote>
FOR A LONG TIME, A SOUND HAS BEEN WORSE THAN MANY
IMAGES, A SOUND FROM EYES WITHOUT A FACE,
AT NIGHT, IN A CEMETERY, A MAN IN A HURRY ATTACKS THE SLOR
OF THE FAMILY VAULT WITH A PICK. HIS FEARFUL ACCOMPLICE
WEARS A DARK RAIN COAT AND, ON A NEIGHBORING TOMB,
THEY HAVE LAID AN INERT BODY, A KIND OF MUMMY. WHEN THROWN
INTO THE FINALLY OPEN VAULT, THE BODY SMASHES WITH A
SHARP SOUND

<caption>[Fig. 1] Reenactment of the writing process of Daney's text (Source: Galibert-Lainé 2017)</caption>

And, finally, there is the time of writing, which the reader usually knows nothing about, but which Daney suggests would be superimposable on the time spent "in the dark" facing the film, since writing would mean "rewriting in visible ink" what the film has already written (or "imprinted") on us during the viewing. However, here Daney chose not to mention the fact that these invisible notes might have been largely erased and rewritten over the years.

Is it possible to distinguish the traces of these four distinct temporalities within the text "L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Franju"? This is one of the first questions I asked myself when I created my film. Or, to be more precise, I started from the following intuition: if we accept the idea that cinema is "the art of inventing time," it is probable that exploring a memory account through the means of cinema will allow light to be shed on the different time strata in a productive way.

*L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney starts with a long writing sequence. Daney's text appears, word by word, in green*
on the black screen<fnref n="8" /> (fig. 1). A typing error, a minute of hesitation, give the viewer the impression of discovering the text as it is being written. Several viewers described having the same impression when watching this sequence, it can seem as if we are looking over the shoulder of the critic while he is at work. While the text is appearing, the original soundtrack of the scene Daney is describing from memory is being played in real time.

By putting myself in Daney's shoes in a completely fictitious way when I filmed this passage, trying to guess the words on which he could have stumbled, I also had the very striking feeling of "rewriting with visible ink on invisible ink." Because I was literally writing over Daney's words by copying them from the book onto my computer screen. But also because, as the words were transiting through me, I realized how debatable each one of them was, how radically subjective the text was, beneath its apparently relatively objective description of the content of the film (how the characters are acting, what they are wearing...). Thanks to this exercise, I acquired a sensitive and intimate understanding of what the passage quoted above is trying to explain. Describing a film from memory, even without trying to intentionally insert one's own affects, always means writing over in visible ink, that is to say translating into a language understandable by all, the subjective, incomplete, and largely non-verbal traces the film has imprinted upon us during the viewing.

This opening sequence explores several tensions. First, there is the confrontation between the time of Franju's film (the one that is imprinted on the film roll, or in this case, in the audio part of the .mp4 file), and the time of critical writing. Since the way my film is edited means they happen at the same time, viewers are invited to notice the gaps: the times when describing the noise takes more time than the actual noise itself, or, on the contrary,

<footnote n="8">8 I chose these colors to recall the screen of the Apple II computer Daney probably had at the time (according to Pierre Eugène, to whom I am very thankful for this information).</footnote>
270 the times when the writing ignores some elements of the soundtrack and anticipates the arrival of a significant sound event. These gaps also reveal the subjectivity at work when writing a text. I think it is also possible to perceive what I became aware of when I shot this sequence while watching the film. By confronting the memory with the object it recalls, the editing invites people to reflect on how each word chosen by Daney matches the sound it describes. Is the sound of the dead body hitting the bottom of the vault really "sudden"? Is that the term you would have used? If not, does that mean Daney is not remembering it correctly, or simply that this noise evokes a different network of mental associations for you? Besides, memory accounts sometimes omit some elements, the importance of which is only revealed afterwards. For example, the way my film is edited allows viewers who are familiar with Daney's text to realize that he is not talking about the blaring throbbing of the plane flying over the cemetery during the scene, although he will conclude his memory account on the image of that specific plane, the sound of which he has forgotten (this "amazing shot," this "purely poetic" move).

The videographic exploration of Daney's account offers the possibility of confronting three texts in a synchronous way: the filmic text, given to read in all its sensitive and symbolic density (although the fact that there are no images here makes it easier to read by forcing viewers to focus on the soundtrack alone); Daney's memory text, which demonstrates both his subjective perceptions during the screening and the way these perceptions have matured in his memory over the years; and a third virtual text, the one you would write yourself if you were free to choose your own words to describe the scene you can hear, and of which you might already have a personal memory. The different public screenings of *L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney* have given me the opportunity to observe the performative efficiency of this sequence, which can be measured through the fervor with which, each time, at least one member of the audience took the mic to tell "their" version of *Les Yeux sans visage*. In this
sense, I think that the film constitutes a performative study of
Daney's text. It offers an analysis of the memory mechanisms
which underpin the critic's account whilst inviting the audience to
observe the ways in which these same mechanisms are at work in
their own memories of the film.

The Future of Viewers’ Accounts: Reading
and Memorial Transmission

It is because the memory text has this contagious quality—
because we have all experienced how difficult it is, when lis-
tening to someone’s personal memory, not to start looking for
the memory of a similar experience in our own mind—that the
analysis of Daney’s text made me think more generally about the
different possible modes of reception of this type of account.
What effect can this type of text have on contemporary readers?
What can they learn from it, even if—particularly if—they are
not familiar with Franju’s film? I was all the more interested in
this question since, as I said in the film, I had myself never seen
*Les Yeux sans visage* when I first came across Daney’s text. So, I
had to find out how to document the way in which my intimate
knowledge of Daney’s memory account would inform my dis-
covery of the film. I took inspiration from methods developed
by auto-ethnographers Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner.
In my film, I tried to produce an “aesthetic and evocative thick
description of [my] personal and interpersonal experience”
(Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011) when I first watched *Les Yeux
sans visage*. The aim of that explicitly auto-reflexive sequence
was, once again, to invite my viewers to engage themselves into
interspective work by thinking about the way Daney’s words,
which they were (re)discovering on the screen, informed their
perception of the images on screen.

It is at this stage of the research process that the fact that *Les
Yeux sans visage* is a terrifying movie became very important.
Intuitively, I thought that out of all the emotions that a film can
<figure><img src="image_32.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 2] The graft scene from *Les Yeux sans visage* seen through the prism of Daney's memory (Source: Galibert-Lainé 2017)</figcaption></figure>

produce, fear would be the most likely to be negated by a precise knowledge of the events happening in the film. By recounting the two most frightening scenes of the film (Daney relates not only the cemetery scene but also the scene of the face graft), did Daney not make me immune to the fear they are supposed to create at the risk of ruining my pleasure as a viewer? Or, on the contrary, would it intensify my experience by making me *anticipate* what would be shown (and heard)? Jean-Marc Leveratto et Laurent Jullier claim that some “negative emotional states such as disgust or fear” can become “delectable” if “their structure is brought to consciousness rather than being buried and working mysteriously” (2010, 7). Thus, would Daney’s account paradoxically turn the fear Franju’s film creates into a pleasurable experience, whereas it would have been difficult to watch otherwise? The central sequence of my film shows this experience as well as the strategy of visual obstruction I adopted because of the anticipated fear created by Daney’s text (fig. 2).

What I experienced when I shot this sequence is that Daney’s text had not ruined my discovery of Franju’s film in any way. However, it had undeniably modified its parameters by influencing my horizon of expectations and directing my attention towards some
<figure><img src="image_33.png" /><figcaption>[Fig. 3] Two memory accounts, separated by 30 years of technological evolution
(Source: Galibert-Lainé 2017)</figcaption></figure>

details that I might have ignored otherwise. Nevertheless, I must say that Daney's text did not guide my reactions in a deterministic way. As I said in the film, I realized in retrospect that I had unintentionally modified Daney's account, that I had *remembered it incorrectly*. I had made his memory mine. My sensations as a viewer were thus enriched, not directly by Daney's, but by the feelings and thoughts I had had when reading his text.

Regardless, after shooting *L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney* and screening it at various events, I became aware that there is something else at stake linked to the reading and transmission of viewers' accounts. They can of course enrich the way we perceive old films, but they can also provide us with tools to understand more contemporary films and media. I previously mentioned how, at every screening of my film, a member of the audience would take the floor to tell their own version of Franju's film. But, oftentimes, someone would take the floor to talk about another film. This might be because, in my film, I respond to Daney's text with a personal memory linked to my viewing experience of Danny Boyle's *Shallow Grave*, released in 1994 (fig. 3). Once, someone talked about the sound of the boots in the opening scene of Jean-Pierre Melville's *L'Armée des ombres* (1969);
274 another time, a young woman talked with emotion about how terrified she was by the clinking sound of the were-rabbit in Nick Park and Steve Box's *Wallace and Gromit* (2005).

It might be irreverent to compare *Les Yeux sans visage*, a film that is so important in the history of cinema, to *Shallow Grave* or *Wallace and Gromit*. As far as I am concerned, I must admit that I was quite embarrassed to realize that Danny Boyle's film played, in my cinema education, a similar role to the one *Les Yeux sans visage* played in that of Daney. But this is something that Daney had anticipated himself. Indeed, at the beginning of his diary, he wrote:

> Children who were born with television will never have the same relationship to cinema [that we have]. ... It's silly to think that during each new period in the (materialistic) history of perception, old things are not re-discovered nor reconsidered. As if we should be ashamed to have discovered Keaton without live piano music in the room. The saddest part (for me) would be if, for these young people, cinema had completely turned into Culture, and would thus only be consumable in a commemorative way, like a *son et lumière* show. Conversely, the greatest thing would be the need to re-read Eisenstein for a music video. (1993, 42-43)

This excerpt shows how wrong the people are who make Daney the representative of a nostalgic cinephilia and someone who is utterly pessimistic about the future of film forms. This excerpt also makes me feel that it is carrying the work initiated by the critic, by using his text about Franju to give an opportunity to a contemporary viewer to reflect on the impact *Wallace and Gromit* had on the little girl she was in 2005.

At the end of this reflection, it seems to me that exploring a memory account like Daney's videographically allows us to reactivate its *presence* in our contemporary era in different ways. First, it is about sharing the experiential present of the moment Daney is recalling in the film. Replaying the writing process
allows us to create a situation, maintained over a certain time, in which viewers can become aware of the memory process which is at the origin of the text. As they are invited to compare each word chosen by Daney to the sounds he aimed to describe, viewers become aware of the gap between the film and Daney's memory account of it—a gap that can be explained both by the difficulty of verbally translating a sound object and by the disconcerting liberties Daney's memory sometimes took. Shooting this audiovisual essay also gave me the opportunity to measure, both empirically and intimately, how much reading a viewer's account can inform a future viewing experience by creating a context in which the film is loaded with all the meanings the first viewer invested in it, and enriched by the expectations that the account will have created in the second viewer's mind. The observation my video essay ends on brings up a useful analogy. Previous viewers, whether they are on the screen or have been members of the audience before us, influence the way we, in turn, perceive what we know they have perceived first. Finally, I want to argue that these memory accounts, by Daney and others, are not only supposed to be read reverently or to enrich our understanding of the great films in the history of cinema. We are allowed to divert them from their primary goal, to take them out of their socio-historical context, and to use them to shed some light onto our contemporary viewing experiences, even if it is through uncertain analogies. Daney himself would probably be happy that his story is being used. Indeed, in May 1992, during the meeting with *Traffic* at the Jeu de Paume, he said the following words, in which it is hard not to perceive a testamentary intention:

> As for memory, if it only serves to cultivate the nostalgia of what was before and how much better it was, then I hate it. Memory only makes sense if, suddenly, someone says: "Oh, your story is interesting. I need it for...". (2015, 37)

Everyone can finish this sentence as they wish: for *what* do we need these viewers' accounts? "I need it..." to try to grasp what cinema represented to a generation of viewers I have not known,
References

Daney, Serge. 1993. *L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur*. Paris: P.O.L.

——. 1999. *Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, cinéma, télévision, information: 1988-1991*. Lyon: Aléas.

——. 2012. *La Maison cinéma et le monde, Vol. 3, Les années Libé (1986-1991)*. Paris: P.O.L.

——. 2015. *La Maison cinéma et le monde, Vol. 4, Le moment Trafic (1991-1992)*. Paris: P.O.L.

Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. 2011. "Autoethnography: An Overview." *Forum: Qualitative Social Research* 12 (1). Accessed July 10, 2019. doi: 10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589.

Galibert-Lainé, Chloé. 2017. *L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Daney*. Accessed July 10, 2019. https://vimeo.com/212253201.

Grant, Catherine. 2016. "The Audiovisual Essay as Performative Research." *Necsus European Journal of Media Studies*, Autumn 2016. Accessed July 10, 2019. https://necusejms.org/the-audiovisual-essay-as-performative-research/.

Haseman, Brad. 2006. "A Manifesto for Performative Research." *Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy* 118: 98-106.

Leveratto, Jean-Marc, and Laurent Jullier. 2010. "L'expérience du spectateur." *Degrés 38* (142): 1-16.
<figure><img src="image_34.png" /></figure>
FANDOM

CINEPHILIA

FAN ART

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
[13]

# Cinephilic Fandom

Philipp Dominik Keidl

Using Luca Guadagnino's 2017 film *Call Me by Your Name* as a case study, this essay investigates the phenomena of cinephilic fandom and cinephilic fan art. It argues that cinephilic fandom represents a specific form of film spectatorship, characterized by an engagement with cinephilic debates through practices that are usually associated with fandom. Cinephilic fan art is defined as the drawings, videos, and self-made merchandise that are inspired by "cinephiliac moments." As such, this essay argues, cinephilic fandom has the potential to introduce new voices, practices, and interpretations into debates of cinephilia.
In Luca Guadagnino's *Call Me by Your Name* (2017), toward the middle of the film: 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) steps from a dark corridor into his bedroom, which is currently being loaned to his family's house guest, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old graduate student from the United States. He softly closes the door, careful to make no sound, looks around, and begins snooping through Oliver's belongings, which are spread across the room. Elio picks up Oliver's drying red swimsuit from the bed frame and sits down on the squeaky mattress. Only his naked back is visible, but the sound of the synthetic material and the slight tilt of his head and subsequent inhalation presents him exploring the bathing suit with all of his senses. He throws the shorts on the bed, turns around, gives them a brief pensive look, and puts them over his head. Spreading his legs and pushing his upper body up so that he is on all fours, he arches his back and gently moves back and forth until the trunks fall off his head. For these short 10 seconds, Elio's growing love and lust for Oliver is captured by his fleeting body movement, the crackling noise of synthetic fabric, and the rustling of wind in the trees outside the room.

Interpretations of this scene have circulated in different forms and formats online, demonstrating the impact that it has had on many viewers. For instance, a drawing named "Lust" depicts in warm colors Elio's sexual arousal when his head is immersed in the smell and feel of the swim trunks.<fnref n="1" /> Despite the painting's stillness, it provides the impression of a continuous time span in which Elio moves on the bed tenderly, but with determination. Other works take more liberty with their depictions of the scene. One Kawaii Chibi-style sticker, available for purchase on Etsy, shows Elio with the trunks on his head and provides a glimpse

<footnote n="1">1 See: Aloysius J. Gleek, "Re: Armie Hammer & Timothée Chalamet find Love in *Call Me by Your Name* (November 24, 2017)," *BetterMost* (forum post). Accessed February 14, 2020, https://bettermost.net/forum/index.php?topic=53351.540.</footnote>
of how he might have blushed while on all fours.<fnref n="2" /> Finally, the red shorts are featured on a poster with more than sixty objects from the film, also sold on Etsy. Even if the objects are devoid of their diegetic contexts, they evoke memories of concrete scenes, such as Elio's trip into Oliver's room, or the film's aesthetic and atmosphere of 1980s' Italy as called forth, for instance, by more marginal props such as a cigarette pack, newspaper, and bus ticket.<fnref n="3" /> These different examples all enable one to (re)experience *Call Me by Your Name* beyond the moving image through their attention to minute details.

The artistic responses to *Call Me by Your Name*, this essay argues, are the result of *cinephilic fandom*, a specific disposition of film spectatorship that cannot be reduced to either cinephilia or fandom. Neither of these concepts remains productive in and of itself for the analysis of cinephilic discourses that are strongly influenced and driven by practices usually associated with fandom. Consequently, the analysis of the phenomenon of cinephilic fandom requires film and media scholars to combine theories and methods from cinephilia and fan studies. By bringing together the two subfields, this essay follows the idea that "just as there have been many 'cinemas' over the course of the history of the medium, there have also been many 'cinéphilias'," and that there is a need to "multiply a diversity of voices and subjectivities, and a plethora of narratives about cinephilic life and experience" (Shambu 2020, n.p.). The aim of this argument is to assign new value and use to ideas, methods, and voices that have been excluded from discussions of cinephilia

<footnote n="2">2 See: MewtantArt, "Call Me by Your Name Kawai Chibi Stickers Set of 11," *Etsy*. Accessed September 18, 2020, https://www.etsy.com/listing/781338717/call-me-by-your-name-kawaiichibi?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=call+me+by+your+name+sticke+rs&ref=sr gallery-1-20&organic_search click=1.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 See: JordanBoltonDesign, "Call Me by Your Name Poster, Artwork by Jordan Bolton," *Etsy*. Accessed September 18, 2020, https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/694768656/call-me-by-your-name-poster-artwork-by?ref=shop_home_active_15&crt=1.</footnote>
282 because of their impulsive subordination into the categories and norms of fandom. This subordination is caused by predetermined categorizations of cinephiles and fans, based on cultural hierarchies that draw artificial but nevertheless sharp lines between high art (cinephilia) and popular culture (fandom) without examining in more detail the kind of debates in which fans and cinephiles engage.

Moreover, cinephilia is defined by "watching but also thinking, reading, talking and writing about cinema in some form, no matter how unconventional" (Shambu 2020, n.p.). Yet the plea for unconventional practices is rarely extended to the production of creative content beyond the written word. While video essays have found their place in discourses about film, allowing for more leeway for visual and formal experimentation (Smith 2011; Keathley, Mittell, and Grant 2019), written criticism continues to be considered the backbone of cinephilia.<fnref n="4" /> In turn, transformative creative works that take more artistic freedom and (re)interpret, expand, and mash up films with other media content—often acting outside the intended meanings of film and media producers—remains neglected if not shut out from discussions on cinephilia. At best, such works are labeled as "fan cult cinephilia" (Elsaesser 2005, 36) but without considering questions of what motivates and characterizes fandom or what fan studies can offer to the study of cinephilia. The idea of cinephilic fandom is an attempt to overcome these theoretical and structural barriers of cinephilia and fan studies; it is also an attempt to widen perspectives on who can say something about film and cinema, what they can say, and how they can say it.

As the first section argues, the cinephilic fan is both fluent in subcultures and characterized by thinking about cinema and engaging with cinephilic discourses through activities and media

<footnote n="4">4 For examples, see: "Video Essays," *Project: New Cinephilia* (blog post). Accessed October 27, 2020. https://projectcinephilia.mubi.com/resources/video-essays/.</footnote>
production associated with fandom; fandom and cinephilia can be seen as two ideal positions on a spectrum of film spectatorship that are united by affect and productivity. The second section defines the appropriations and reinterpretations of film into other media as a form of cinephilic fan art: works that translate cinephiliac moments (Keathley 2006) into media ranging from videos to drawings, posters, mashups, or self-made merchandise. Finally, the third section maintains that the cinephilic fan is themselves evidence of the continuous transformation in the way film, cinema, and knowledge is discussed and diffused through diverse practices among different communities.

## Cinephilic Fandom

Asked in an interview what distinguishes cinephilia from fandom, Henry Jenkins concludes that at “the end of the day, they’re doing exactly the same thing” and “the line [between fandom and cinephilia] blurs very quickly” (Jenkins 2015, n.p.). Jenkins is certainly not the only scholar who questions the “too-tidy division of fan and cinephilic discourses into separate camps” (Keller 2020, 77). Discussions about new configurations of cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction and a growing love for cinema beyond the structures established in pre-war and post-war France have diversified the concept (de Valck and Hagener 2005; Balcerzak and Sperb 2009; Balcerzak and Sperb 2012). Research on queer and feminist cinephilia (Hallas 2003; Kim 2005; White 1999), techno-centric cinephilia (Klinger 2006; Hudson and Zimmermann 2009), and globalized and transnational forms of cinephilia (Rosenbaum and Martin 2003; de Valck 2007; Bhattacharya Chairs 2004; Trice 2015; Vidal 2017) are only a few examples that broaden the definition of cinephilia as cultural practice and theoretical concept to varying degrees and question its assumed universalism by underlining the multiplicities and approaches that it constitutes. Still, even though similarities between fandom and cinephilia are stressed regularly, the differences seem to
284 outweigh them to the effect that a tidy division between fans and cinephiles continues to be made in film and media scholarship.

Of course, there are considerable differences between cinephiles and fans as well as cinephile and fan studies, both historically and today. The notion of being a fan refers to a much broader field of culture than cinephilia, with its narrow focus on film and cinema. One can be a fan of television, video games, sports, comics, literature, opera, dance, theatre, celebrities, politicians, toy lines, themed environments, or animals, for example. As such, fan studies can be applied to a much wider field of discourse and practices (Booth 2018; Click and Scott 2018; Sarver Coombs and Osborne 2022). Even if we consider research on home entertainment and digital technologies (de Valck and Hagener 2005; Klinger 2006; Hudson and Zimmermann 2009; Balcerzak and Sperb 2009; Balcerzak and Sperb 2012), film and cinema remain at the core of cinephilia scholarship, whereby practices that deviate from it, such as cosplay or fan-made art and merchandise, get neglected.

Additionally, there are different dynamics among academics and non-academics, even though scholarship on both cinephilia and fandom habitually connect personal and theoretical perspectives (Hagener and de Valck 2008; Hills 2002). Whereas theories on cinephilia have always had a strong presence in public discourse outside of universities, with the effect that the concept had lost its bite for many academics for a time (Keathley 2006), fan studies does not receive similar interest and acknowledgment among fans themselves. "Aca-fans" have shaped the sub-field since the 1990s and collaborated with fans, but there are also fans who mistrust academics and dismiss their analyses and theories in their own discussions and writings (Neville 2018; Pignetti 2020; Hills 2002). Moreover, cinephilia and fan studies have dissimilar relationships to the study of the history of their object of study. Scholarship on cinephilia demonstrates great interest in theories and practices before the 1950s, such as the notion of "protocinephilia" and photogénie in the 1920s (Keathley 2006), whereas historical fan cultures and practices dating from before the second
half of the twentieth century continue to be unrepresented in fan
studies (Reagin and Rubenstein 2011).

Furthermore, fandom has different forms of institutionalization
than cinephilia, therefore impacting the traceability of works and
ideas and theories connected to them. Although they have similar
infrastructures in the form of clubs, journals, magazines, blogs,
and zines, many fans do not achieve the same name recognition
as cinephiles. Whereas written criticism is more likely to tie spe-
cific ideas to identifiable authors, most notably in magazines like
*Cahiers du cinéma* or *Senses of Cinema* or in the form of popular
blogs, many fan writers and artists are often known only by
pseudonyms, and works frequently circulate online without any
reference to their makers.

Finally, although both are a global phenomenon, cinephilia as
a practice and way of thinking about cinema began in France,
whereas fandom and fan studies emerged in scholarship from
the United Kingdom, the USA, and Japan. Add vernacular clichés
and prejudices of high and low culture—the fan as a cultural dupe
and cinephile as cultural elite, the former as someone who mind-
lessly consumes everything and the other a connoisseur of one
art form—and the boundary between cinephiles and fans seems
to reappear.

Yet, these differences often say more about scholars' attempts
to establish universalized and naturalized categories about fans
and cinephiles than about how individuals are inspired by film
and cinema and participate in debates about it. Both cinephilia
and fandom suffer from scholarly definitions that limit them to
archetypes that are simultaneously too broad and too narrow.
Definitions of cinephilia are broad in the sense that it is defined
as a love for film and cinema as a whole, but narrow in the sense
of which debates belong to the phenomenon and how they can
be expressed. In fandom, definitions are narrow in the sense that
fans are often reduced to one specific fandom and broad when
it comes to the ways they engage with their object of fandom. To
put it pointedly, one is either too dedicated to one medium or too indifferent to medium specificity. However, archetypical conceptions of fandom and cinephilia should be considered two ideal positions on a spectrum of interpretations of film spectatorship and the productivity of film spectators. This spectrum is united by two aspects that differentiate fans and cinephiles, and everyone in between, from regular audiences. The first common denominator is affect. Consider Sarah Keller's definition of cinephilia:

> First, *cinephilia is an affect*, something that derives from feeling and is therefore personal and subjective. Second, *cinephilia is an extension of affect into actions*: it manifests itself (makes itself visible) in such actions, especially through but not limited to writing. Third, cinephilia depends on displacements in time and space. As a partial result of this dependence, it tends to be nostalgic. Another result is that it is interested in relationships between past and present. Finally—the thing that undergirds the three previous categories — *cinephilia is fundamentally anxious*. (all emphases by Keller 2020, 15)

Her description of cinephilia resembles the emphasis put on the affective qualities of media fandom (Grossberg 1992), fans' participation and productivity (Jenkins, 1992), the complex relationship between past and present (Geraghty 2014), as well as the anxiety over loss that shapes fandom and some of its expressions (De Kosnik 2016). This also becomes evident in Jenkins's early definition of fandom as "a particular mode of reception ... set of critical and interpretive practices ... base for consumer activism ... forms of cultural production, aesthetic traditions and practices [and] alternative social community" (Jenkins 1992, 284–87). These observations resonate with Keller's evaluation that cinephilia "often depends on a sense of other movies ... inspires a drive to connect to other things and products ... is interested in the material, technological, aesthetic, social, or other qualities specific to itself ... and fixates on strong feelings, frequently mixed between good and bad" (Keller 2020, 15).
Definitions of cinephilia and fandom also highlight the spectrum's second common denominator: productivity. Fans and cinephiles are both "undisciplined spectators" as they easily switch between being immersed in a film's narrative, as the filmmaker intends, and a "panoramic perception" (Keathley 2006), with which they look at the screen with more distance and their own agency in determining what is of most interest to them. The result is the discovery of details that have minimal or no narrative purpose, but nevertheless capture their attention and interest. Fans often explore these details in their own fanfiction, to name only one example, in which they develop the backstory of minor characters or explore parts of the hyper-dieges not depicted in the film (Hills 2002). Among cinephiles, the fetishization of moments that are visible for all but only provocative to a few are described as "cinephiliac moments" (Keathley 2006). When encountered in a film, Christian Keathley explains, expanding on Paul Willemen's concept, cinephiliac moments "spark something which then produces the energy and the desire to write, to find formulations to convey something about the intensity of that spark" (2006, 140). Writing represents a means to share and extend these experiences as "cinephiliac anecdotes," personal recollections of cinephiliac moments, and the sensation when something captures your interest (Keathley 2006, 140–52). In the case of the cinephilic fan, however, writing is only one of many media interpretations into which this energy is channeled.<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="5">5 Adapting Willemen's terminology, Keathley uses the term "cinephiliac" over "cinephilic" in order to stress the overtones of necrophilia in cinephilia. However, even though a complex relationship to the past is evident in both fandom and cinephilia, this essay does not consider necrophilia to be a defining aspect of cinephilic fandom. While some individuals may engage with themes of death, the overall dynamics of cinephilic fandom demonstrate more diverse dynamics.</footnote>
Cinephilic Fan Art

Cinephiliac moments are “a reminder that films are themselves made up of fragments” (Keathley 2006, 38), and cinephilic art, much like cinephilic writing, also reflects the fragmentary nature of filmmaking. Consider the following three drawings. Elio is lying on his back with the red shorts, first all over his face, and then, in the second picture, with them covering his mouth. Finally, the last drawing shows him taking them nearly off of his face completely.<fnref n="6" /> These three drawings make direct reference to the film and to Elio playing with Oliver’s shorts, although the artist took the liberty of presenting an alternative version of the film scene. In the drawings, Elio is wearing the same shorts and no shirt, but he is resting on his back instead of being on all fours. With Elio’s relaxed body posture and flushed cheeks, this image depicts an idea of how the scene of Elio with the swimsuit can be read as a post-masturbation blush. Although more consequential than how Elio is shown to act on his fantasies in the film, the drawings retain the same narrative in suggesting his longing for Oliver. Yet, by offering a different perspective on Elio’s actions, rearranging how he moves in space, and implying that he lingers longer on Oliver’s bed than he does in the film, the drawings emphasize that Guadagnino’s directorial choices for framing and editing represent only one possible way to tell the story. Cinephiliac moments, and the art inspired by them, therefore enable awareness of the restrictions imposed upon them by framing and editing, always limiting the visible to what the filmmaker has chosen (Keathley 2006).

This extends not only to aesthetic and narrative questions, but also points toward criticism of the film for teasing audiences

<footnote n="6">6 See: Paolacosette Vica, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 21, 2020, https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/249246160613294791/; Madeline Bass, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 21, 2020, https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/249246160613294794/; Paolacosette Vica, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 21, 2020, https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/249246160613294801/.</footnote>
with several scenes of uninhibited kissing and foreplay but ultimately shying away from showing explicit images of the couple having sex—even though Elio is shown having sex with a girl. For instance, some drawings frame the scene differently and show Elio’s backside or partly reveal his penis while they are having oral sex. They foreground Guadagnino’s complicity with directors of other mainstream gay-themed movies by “limit[ing] the visibility of gay male sex, whose depiction is scrupulously kept from approaching the explicitness reserved for hetero-cons summations” (Miller 2018, n.p.). Other examples go even further, such as re-edits of the film that integrate pornographic scenes, mix stills from the film’s non-explicit sex scenes with porn shots, place sex noises over shots from the film, or play the film’s sound-track over animated porn.<fnref n="7" /> While D.A. Miller argues in his review of the film that Guadagnino uses the beauty of Italy to distract from the physical aspects of gay relationships, the added images and sounds of the porn versions provide an explicitness that the film denies its audiences. Cinephilic fans create those scenes that the director chose to exclude from the script;<fnref n="8" /> or, as Miller puts it, “the gay sex scene that [the film] spent well over an hour making everyone anticipate, a scene that might have taken our breath away for real” (2018, n.p.). In other words, cinephilic fandom is

<footnote n="7">7 See: Rob Gee, Pinterest. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www. pinterest.ca/pin/784330091336821122/; Rob Gee, Pinterest. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/784330091336820956/; Rob Gee, Pinterest. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.pinterest. ca/pin/784330091336822189/; “Call Me by My Name Gay Sex Scenes,” Cloudy Girls. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.cloudygirls.com/porn/ call-me-by-my-name-gay-sex-scenes.html; “Elio and Oliver Part 2,” impornhub (video). Accessed September 18, 2020, 03:37min, https://www.pornhub.com/ view_video.php?viewkey=ph5e2d19c6f1ac4&utm_source=PBWeb&utm_ medium=PT&utm_campaign=PBWeb; “Call Me by Your Name-Porn Version,” impornhub (video). Accessed September 18, 2020, 04:53min, https://www. impornhub.com/viewvideo.php?viewkey=ph5e8e3db63e5ee.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Screenwriter James Ivory criticized the lack of nudity and camera pans away from the lovers (Brockington 2018) and the removal of much more suggestive scenes from the original script than those featured in the film (Wheeler 2018).</footnote>
290 expressed in the production of new scenes that are inspired by the film and that fans would have liked to see in the original version.

The selection of cinephiliac moments is as subjective as their reinterpretation into other media, and cinephilic fan art brings the active eyes of different spectators together and makes these moments perceivable. By definition, cinephiliac moments may not be intended to be memorable and therefore escape the attention of the general audience, but this does not mean that several individuals cannot share one and the same fascination (Keathley 2006). Two kinds of questions need to be asked when talking about the cinephiliac moment: “what” has one seen and “how” have they seen it? Just as critical writing on cinephiliac moments is one means to establish connections to the personal, fan art provides “information about how [the artists] read, interpret, and use the text” (Cherry 2016, 39). Aquarelle paintings, pencil drawings, comics and manga, stickers, and abstract posters all show subjective approaches to a scene. Crucially, fan communities have always had the “centrifugal” approach to cinema (Shambu 2020, n.p.), and built contact zones for remixing (Hudson and Zimmerman 2009) all forms of culture that conceptions of cinephilia in the digital age aim to institute. Cinephilic fan art establishes connections beyond film culture and history, drawing from a much broader intertextual repertoire: it reimagines scenes from *Call Me by Your Name* as a Studio Ghibli production, places shots of Oliver and Elio in impressionist paintings, produces mash-up trailers to foreground homoerotic subtexts in contemporary television shows, sketches images of the couple in the style of manga or Young Adult fiction cover art, materializes them as puppets, draws them as Furries, or recreates dialogues from the films by creating playlists with songs whose titles match the words spoken in certain scenes.<fnref n="9" /> If cinephiles build on their

<footnote n="9">9 See: @bibbongtsubibo, Twitter. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://twitter.com/bibbongtsubibo/status/961539447874404352; Rachel Thompson, “Genius Instagram account merges ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Scenes with</footnote>
personal preferences and memories of their previous cinema-
going experiences, always analyzing the place of individual films
in film history, cinephilic fans establish connections across media.
Such cross-media cinephilic fan canons are highly personal and
individualized, and challenge those engaging with cinephilic fan
art to constantly test their pop cultural knowledge, researching
references they may not yet know as they are "moving across
different fandoms... moving across these different forms of fan
knowledge" (Hills 2015, 158-59). Resistance to medium-specific
canons, especially in a time of media convergence, participatory
culture, and transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006), bears the
potential to rethink earlier cinephile canons and to bring them
into dialogue with the popular culture of their time.

The intertextuality of cinephilic fan art also redirects attention
away from questions regarding film's ontology, which have been
central in cinephile debates and scholarship (Keathley 2006;
Keller 2020). Although there have been prominent claims about

Monet Paintings," *Mashable*. Accessed March 15, 2018, https://mashable.com/2018/03/15/call-me-by-monetInstagram/?europe=true; Robazizo's Tumblings, *Tumbler* (post). Accessed September 21, 2018, https://robazizo.tumbler.com/post/178316216644/call-me-by-your-name-manga-illustrated-by-yamimaru; "Great Showdowns by Scott C." *Tumbler* (post). Accessed September 20, 2020, https://greatshowdowns.com/post/174601335819/call-me-by-your-name-and-ill-call-you-by-mine; Mediodescocido, "Elio & Oliver / Call Me by Your Name." *Flickr* (post). Accessed April 10, 2018, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mediodescocido/26507452597/; StarFrom-Phoenix, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://fi.pinterest.com/pin/585679126520889193/; Grace Pagdanganan, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.pinterest.it/pin/480407485253228641/; Baranorgi, "Fan Art/ Call Me by Your Name," *Furaffinity* (forum post). Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.furaffinity.net/view/31378777/; planetvcr, "So Call Me by Your Name-," *DeviantArt*. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.deviantart.com/planetvcr/art/so-call-me-by-your-name-829882093; Jindo K, "Call Me by Your Name (but it's The Office)," *YouTube* (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 02:09 min, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09clKg000Yc&t=315&ab_channel=jindok; See: Dark Alex. "Call Me by Your Name TikTok Compilations," *YouTube* (playlist). Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLxa5Tgk6fZYFQI7nLrTe9SSO4li1TeaWC.
film as a photographic medium having a privileged relationship to reality, others have begun to reexamine if this was ever really the case (Keathley 2009). Indexicality also only plays a minor part in cinematic art, but connections exist nevertheless. This becomes especially evident in the many forms of fan tourism and pilgrimages (Williams 2017) to Italy, shared in the form of videos, slide shows, or individual photographs. One of the most popular endeavors of this kind has been a photo project that matches film stills from *Call Me by Your Name* to their original shooting locations, merging stills from the film (shot on 35mm) with the fan's own (digital) photos taken at the shooting locations.<fnref n="10" /> A more abstract take is represented by art engaging with the depiction of landscape and nature in the film. Landscape and nature “have long been sources for cinematic splendor and cinema” (Keller 2020, 130) and this becomes evident in collages pairing photographs from the film together with impressionist paintings. By placing Elio and Oliver in paintings by Monet, among other painters, the collages emphasize—as well as replicate—the excessive use of rustling trees, whipping grass, and splashing water to represent the inner tension of the characters.

Crucially, however, fans document their own moments of film reception and art production. In regards to the former aspect, some fans record videos of themselves watching trailers of or scenes from the film, thereby capturing ephemeral and fleeting moments of the affective film experience.<fnref n="11" /> In terms of the latter,

<footnote n="10">10 See: Jacob Shamsian, "A Fan Flew to Italy to Seamlessly Match the Most Romantic Scenes in 'Call Me by Your Name' to their Real-Life Places," *Insider*. Accessed January 18, 2018, https://www.insider.com/call-me-by-your-name-real-life-italy-vs-movie-photos-2018-1.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 See: Winchester Twin, "We Watch Call Me by Your Name for the First Time," YouTube (video). Accessed June 6, 2023, 20:39 min, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK2GW4Ncokc&ab_channel=WinchesterTwins; Sue 101, "Call Me by Your Name Best Moments: Reaction," YouTube (video). Accessed June 6, 2023, 14:39 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkehrffTyDdk&ab_channel=Sue101; ZZAVID, "Call Me by Your Name *Re-Reaction* *Commentary*, YouTube (video).</footnote>
they document the making of their fan art, in some cases with the film or its soundtrack playing over the video.¹² These videos make transparent the decisions that were made and methods used to produce the final work, preserving affective reactions to the film turned into actions, and making them accessible in the present and future for additional reflection in the form of comments and appreciations about the impact the film had on viewers. In this regard, cinephilic fan art is shifting attention from what happened in front of the camera to what happens in front of a screen and during a screening respectively.

By trying to capture the uncapturable—time and affect—cinephilic fan art brings out the fraught relationship between past, present, and future. Home entertainment caters to the desire of the “fetishistic spectator” to “stop, hold and to repeat” a film (Mulvey 2006, 173). Cinephilic fan art is the result of a viewer’s in-depth scrutiny of images, characters, and storyworlds that circulate cinephiliac moments across media in a more flexible manner, as well as a reading of them against the grain. They can be experienced as desktop background or screen saver, inserted in notebooks and calendars, or hung up on walls as posters and prints. Moreover, if DVDs, Blu-Rays, or digital files are some of the many ways that film can be owned and integrated into the home (Klinger 2006), cinephilic fan art provides fans the opportunity to have *Call Me by Your Name* and the particular scenes that are dear

Accessed September 20, 2020, 31:05 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obXc72nxwCo&ab_channel=ZZAVID.

12 See: Jellyfish Tea, “Call Me by Your Name Fan Art,” YouTube (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 03:06 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cr--JEIT_iw&ab_channel=JellyfishTea; mgxaz, “Call Me by Your Name Fanart,” YouTube (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 04:10 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5hV_E4_Qgc&ab_channel=mgxaz; koikawas, “Call Me by Your Name Speedpaint Except You Can Hear Elio Crying in the Background,” YouTube (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 06:08 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkoW6vke1nw&ab_channel=koikawas, blubibo, “Call Me by Your Name Fanart || Paint with Me,” YouTube (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 07:17 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDsjJ8c_z6s&ab_channel=blubibo.
294 to them in a vast variety of objects, given that fan art is available for purchase on sweaters, shower curtains, mugs, and mobile phone cases, among other products.<fnref n="13" /> They allow their makers and owners to express their appreciation for the film and engage with the characters and storyworlds in all aspects of their everyday lives and routines, be it in their homes, at school, or in their office (Geraghty 2014; Affuso 2018; Santo 2018).

The dynamic between past, present, and future that emerges out of this availability is also crucial to understanding how a feeling of collectivity can emerge out of subjective and personal selections. Although new technologies always provide different opportunities for watching a movie over and over again, any expectation of experiencing it in the same way as the first time will be unfulfilled. Every time one watches a movie the reception differs, be it the result of personal developments or the setting and contexts in which the film is re-watched. Cinephilic fan art balances the old and the new, as the discoveries of new fans allow established fans the opportunity to recollect their previous film experiences while also seeing the film with new eyes because of a different form and format. This process combines what is already known with the anticipation of new interpretations. As sites on Pinterest and Tumblr dedicated to *Call Me by Your Name* indicate, cinephilic fans are collectors of their own cinephilic anecdotes as well as those of others—in the literal sense that freely available fan art can be downloaded and archived and in the metaphorical sense that they create new affects that may lead to further actions. In short, the making, watching, and collecting or curating of fan art counteracts anxieties about the loss and disappearance of, the affection for, and one's personal memories of a film.

<footnote n="13">13 For example, see the *Call Me by Your Name* products offered on Etsy and Redbubble.</footnote>
Cinephilic Fan Criticism

Although a critical and box-office success, *Call Me by Your Name* was also criticized as being an inauthentic, apolitical, and historically unlikely depiction of gay life and sex. In addition, critics voiced concerns about the romanticized sexual relationship between a teenage boy and a man seven years his senior, as well as the celebration of white masculinity in its stylized and bourgeois depiction of 1980s Italy (Galt and Schoonover 2019; Branciforte 2022). Following these concerns, some of the fan art discussed in this essay could also be criticized as reinforcing youth and whiteness as the ultimate in desirability in gay culture (Tortorici 2008) or as being complicit with "gay mainstream" cinema and its normative depiction of queer lives. Still, other examples could be interpreted as actually highlighting the whiteness and tamed depiction of gay sex in *Call Me by Your Name* by positioning and connecting Elio and Oliver to queer culture beyond the mainstream. Neither completely transformative or affirmative, or progressive or regressive, art about *Call Me by Your Name* reflects the many possibilities and conceptions of what it means to be queer, which results in works that can conform but also challenge dominant formulas and canons. As such, neither fandom nor cinephilia—and hence also not cinephilic fandom— is neutral but instead resonates with the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are practiced and the subjectivities of their practitioners.

No matter how the politics of these artworks are interpreted, however, by acknowledging fan practices as cinephilic, new "perspectives on what qualifies as *valuable* or *useful* criticism" (de Valck 2010, 134, emphasizes in original) also emerge. Cinephilic fan art can challenge what participation in cinephilia looks like and what forms it can take, placing the creation of drawings and mash-ups alongside written or video criticism. In some cases, cinephilic art seeks connections to established film canons. For instance, Studio Ghibli-style drawings of Elio and Oliver pay
296 tribute to both Luca Guadagnino and Hayao Miyazaki, celebrating the style of both filmmakers by bringing them together in art and imagining a collaborative approach by two prolific directors. But not every juxtaposition of films, styles, and directorial sensibility is celebratory. Consider the example of the mash-up trailer of *Call Me by Your Name* and the comedy *Stepbrothers* (Adam McKay 2008).<fnref n="14" /> Here, the soundtrack of the former is used to reimagine the latter, a goofy comedy, adding sensitivity where brute humor previously set the tone. The mash-up trailer can be seen as a reinforcement of the division of filmmakers into *auteurs* and *metteurs-en-scène* (Sarris 1963). Hence, even if fan art depends on preexisting images, narratives, and characters, it is crucial not to confuse it with the uncritical embrace of an object or a filmmaker’s oeuvre; on the contrary, cinephilic fan art often transforms the content and style of a film and must therefore be seen for its critical potential that defies hierarchies between director and spectator.

Although auteur theory is less fundamental to contemporary cinephilia than it was in the past, the attention given to film directors as key indicators of value still shapes canons, festival programming, and the catalogues of boutique distributors. The rewriting and re-editing of scenes, or the remediation into other forms and formats, point to a different and shifting power dynamic between filmmaker and spectator. Traditionally, cinephiles appear as critics and are less inclined to create trans formative content such as writing alternative endings, "shipping" characters, or creating crossovers between different media texts, thereby challenging the interpretative authority of the film-makers over their work. In the tradition of cinephilia-as-criticism, hierarchies between directors as the makers of a film and the audience as critics of them remain intact. Fandom, in turn, is built to a great extent on individuals challenging filmmakers by

<footnote n="14">14 See: Alex Langosch, "Step Brothers/Call Me by Your Name Trailer Mashup,"
*YouTube* (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 02:09 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSrcu3l4Uag&t=30s&ab_channel=AlexLangosch.</footnote>
producing their own works based on their favorite characters and storyworlds. If they do not like an aspect of the film, they correct what they deem to need improvement by producing their own media. Indeed, many fans consider themselves to be equal owners and co-producers of a storyworld whose interpretation of and playing with a text matter as much as the filmmakers' ideas (Fiske 1992). In other words, fans give themselves as much authority as the director over a film's narrative and style.

This struggle over authority becomes evident in the creation of explicit sexual content. Cinephilic fan art that focuses on Elio and Oliver's sex can also be understood as a critique of the film for shying away from more explicit depictions to meet the demands of rating systems, as well as the film's homonormative characters that seem to be detached from the queer culture of their time well as from the homophobia of the 1980s. Arguably, this art provides more mature access to the men's sexuality than the hyped scene (as well as some fan art) of Elio masturbating and eventually ejaculating into a peach, a scene that reduces his mature sexual desires to a whimsical act one might associate with high-school comedies. Moreover, by translating the characters into drawings in the style of Boys' Love or the covers of YA queer fiction, the cinephilic fan art positions the film firmly in queer culture and similar narratives that deal with non-heteronormative sexualities and explicitly address the continuing discrimination of queer youth.<fnref n="15" /> Finally, the transformation of Elio and Oliver into drawings is of importance here, as many of them detach these characters from the heterosexual star personas of Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet. Among the fan art, one finds many examples in which the characters, but not the actors, are recognizable.<fnref n="16" /> *Call Me by Your Name* followed the example of

<footnote n="15">15 The Tumblr blog-to-graphic novel-to-Netflix series *Heartstopper* (2022) is a recent example of YA fiction that addresses the effects of bullying and discrimination on queer youth.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 See: Cam's art, "Call Me by Your Name//Fanart Speedpaint," YouTube (video). Accessed September 20, 2020, 03:53 minutes, https://www.</footnote>
298 previous arthouse blockbusters, such as *Brokeback Mountain* (Ang Lee 2005), that cast straight actors in queer roles, and reinforced the actors' straight personas in promotional campaigns. By detaching the characters from the actors, and by visualizing their sexual encounters with less restraint, the artworks confront the media industries and their production schemes that determine what can and cannot be seen, always keeping in mind how to maintain the widest possible audience.

At the same time, the global digital circulation of fan works related to the film has the potential to create awareness for media productions beyond North America and Europe. For example, a drawing depicting the protagonists of the Filipino web series *Gameboys* (2020) in the style of the official *Call Me by Your Name* poster directs attention to non-western queer media as well as to a community and their fight for equality and civil rights.¹⁷ As such, cinephilic fan art carries the potential to give voice to marginalized and underrepresented groups in a film culture dominated by white, straight men from Europe and North America (Shambu 2020, n.p.). Another example is the circulation of films on websites dedicated to porn such as xHamster.com. Alongside alternative fan-edits of films like *Call Me by Your Name*, users of streaming platforms upload select scenes or complete files of films such as *Hawaii* (Marco Berger 2013), *Fanatic Love* (Tingjun Du 2016), or *Phor lae lukchai* (Sarawut Intaraprom 2015). Some of the uploaded films may be programmed at festivals or distributed commercially, but it is through the labor of fans that they become available to a wider audience online and provide

youtube.com/watch?v=cmsq6r9Gc5o&ab_channel=cam%27sart; Madeline Bass, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/249246160613304359/; Madeline Bass, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 20, 2020; https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/249246160611548405/; Madeline Bass, *Pinterest*. Accessed September 20, 2020, https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/249246160613294779/.

17 See: geloxarts. "Gameboys The Series x Call Me by Your Name." *DeviantArt* (forum post). Accessed October 28, 2020. https://www.deviantart.com/geloxarts/art/Gameboys-The-Series-x-Call-Me-By-Your-Name-857024749.
access to queer films with limited or no international distribution. Both of these examples demonstrate that social media and video sharing platforms give audiences a certain degree of independence from release schedules and distribution strategies of the media industries, allowing audiences to seek content and establish connections between *Call Me by Your Name* and queer cinema, television, and porn.

However, cinephilic fans are not operating completely outside of, or in opposition to the media industries. Even the more critical examples of fan art serve as publicity for *Call Me by Your Name*, keeping the film fresh in the public's memory because of the unpaid labor fans perform in their free time (Stanfill 2019). But as the commodification of some fan art demonstrates, cinephilic fandom can also be considered an economic activity that creates an "alternative economy" and "a grey market, where produced artefacts are exchanged as gifts and/or commodities" (Carter 2018, 13). For Carter, alternative economies are defined by three features:

> firstly, the advancement of digital technologies enables audiences to become workers and entrepreneurs; secondly, produced texts are instead artefacts that are exchanged as both gifts and/or commodities; and finally, rules and regulations, such as intellectual property laws, are commonly circumvented, manipulated, and countered to allow enterprise to take place. (15)

The first two features are of particular interest here, as they point to questions of availability, accessibility, and participation in fandom, cinephilia, and cinephilic fandom as well. Although digital technologies offer new opportunities for many, not everyone can afford the technologies to access the Internet or produce their own media. Moreover, even if access to the Internet is available and images can be accessed and saved, not everyone can afford to spend money on merchandise and shipping costs. Neither should the time that goes into the making of fan art be
300 underestimated. The time to create content and "lovebor," the act of visibly loving a fan object (Stanfill 2019, 165-66), is not available to everyone. Digital technologies and associated practices therefore provide *more* availability and accessibility to the film and cinephilic fan communities, although participation nevertheless remains restricted and not as inclusive as it may seem at face value.

Despite these exclusionary socio-economic dynamics, cinephilic fandom does provide *more* diversity and a different set of voices to cinephilia and can further problematize default notions of universal cinephilia that operates on exclusion rather than inclusivity. Again, the emphasis is on *more*, as fan communities themselves have a long history of racism, homophobia, sexism, and xenophobia. Fan communities are not categorically progressive and liberal. They replicate societal and cultural hierarchies and power inequalities. Even if this is not always perceptible in fan-made art, interaction among fans can be toxic in interpersonal as well as online interactions (Fiske 1992; Pande 2018; Busse 2013). While the examples of fan art discussed in this essay may celebrate the love between two men, homophobic tendencies may come to light in other forums. Moreover, fan art cannot provide empirical insights into who stands behind the abstract conceptions of fan and fandom. Reaction videos, video criticism, and other fan-made videos shared on YouTube and TikTok, however, provide insights into how fans engage with the film and connect it to their lived experiences. Their makers are young, queer, international, and racially and ethnically diverse, showing an equally diverse range when it comes to the expression of their ideas and emotions about the film through remakes, remixes, and commentaries. They operate outside international film festival and art house cinema circuits associated with classical cinephilia, displaying film culture as it is practiced in private and public spaces, alone or with peers, led by affect or critical thought. These videos show a generation that grew up with digital technologies as a means for media reception and production, and
a transmedia culture in which cinema has always been thought
of as being in dialogue with other media forms and formats, and
the consumption of transformative fan-made works and criticism
occurred alongside the consumption of legacy media.

Conclusion

In 1996, Susan Sontag famously claimed that if “cinephilia is
dead, then movies are dead too,” fueling premillennial debates
about the death of cinema at the hand of digital technologies.
Since then, cinema and cinephilia have continued to change, but
neither has died. Indeed, alternative interpretations of cinema
and cinephilia have emerged. The makers of the works discussed
in this essay are a new generation of cinephiles rather than the
living dead. Their practices redefine what it means to love and
engage with film and cinema beyond moving images and medium
specificity, echoing as loud reminders that audiences should not
be forced into existing categories of either cinephilia or fandom,
but that definitions of cinephilia and fandom change with the
times and also merge. In the case of the cinephilic fan, this refers
not only to new modes of production, distribution, reception, and
criticism of feature films. It also reconceives cinephiles as creative
producers, who extend and expand the films they love and
criticize across media. Not only do they love to make films and
other media themselves, as did cinephiles before them. Cinephilic
fans love to (re)make the same film all over again across various
media and formats. It is up to film and media scholars—and those
interested in fandom, cinephilia, and audiences in general—to
further examine how these works shape cinephilia.

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## Authors

**Claire Allouche** is currently Attachée Temporaire d'Éducation et de recherche at the Université Paris 8 Saint-Denis-Vincennes (France) and a PhD candidate under the supervision of Dork Zabunyan and Thierry Roche. She trained in Film Studies (Université Paris 8 and ENS Ulm in France, UNSAM in Argentina) and in the humanities and sociology of space at EHESS. Her doctoral research focuses on the process of creating fiction outside the traditional production centres of Argentina and Brazil between 2008 and 2019. She is also a critic (Cahiers du cinéma) and programer (Doc&Doc, CLaP, Regards Satellites).

**Raymond Bellour** is a researcher, author, emeritus research scientist at the CNRS (Paris). He has been responsible for editing the complete works of Henri Michaux in the Pléiade (1996–2004) and has (co)curated several exhibitions (from *Passages de l'image*, 1990, to *Chris Marker*, 2018). His books include *L'Analyse du film* (1979); *L'Entre-Images. Photo, cinéma, vidéo* (1990); *L'Entre-Images 2. Mots, Images* (1999); *Le Corps du cinéma:Hypnoses, Émotions, Animalités* (2009); *La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions* (2012), *Pensées du cinéma* (2016). He is a founding member of the journal *Trafic*.

**Club Des Femmes** are a queer feminist film curation collective, based in the UK and programming since 2007. We curate film screenings and events. Our mission is to offer a freed up space for the re-examination of ideas through art. In the age of the sound-bite Club Des Femmes is a much needed open platform for more radical contextualisation and forward-looking future vision: a chance to look beyond the mainstream. https://www.clubdesfemmes.com

**Mélina Delmas** holds master's degrees in Translation from Université Paris 3 and Université Bordeaux-Montaigne (France), as well as a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Birmingham (UK). Since 2021 she has been working as a Research
306 Assistant at the University of Warwick (UK) where she collaborates closely with Professor Jo Angouri on various projects relating to multilingualism, linguistic landscapes and pedagogy. Additionally, in her role as the Warwick local facilitator for the EUTOPIA alliance, Mélina works to support several EUTOPIA Learning Communities. Mélina has also worked as a freelance translator for various clients since 2014.

Garin Dowd is Professor of Film, Literature and Media at the University of West London, UK. He is the author of *Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari* (Rodopi 2007), co-author (with Fergus Daly) of *Leos Carax* (Manchester University Press, 2003) and co-editor (with Lesley Stevenson and Jeremy Strong) of *Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism* (Intellect) and (with Natalia Rulyova) of *Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting* (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). He is also the author of the chapter on Serge Daney in Felicity Colman (ed.) *Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers* (Acumen, 2009) and of "Pedagogies of the Image between Daney and Deleuze" in *New Review of Film and Television Studies* 8 (1), 2010.

Pierre Eugène is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France) and a member of the Cahiers du cinéma editorial board since 2020. His research focuses on Serge Daney, cinema writers and film aesthetics. He has published articles on many European and American filmmakers, and co-edited *Jean-Claude Biette, appunti et contrappunti* (De l'Incidence, 2018) with Hervé-Joubert-Laurencin and Philippe Fauvel. His book *Serge Daney, Exercices de relecture* (Éditions du Linteau, 2023) has just appeared, and he is currently working on a book devoted to Paul Vecchiali's film *Femmes femmes* (1974) (Yellow Now Editions).

Chloé Galibert-Laîné is a French researcher and filmmaker. They hold a PhD from the Ecole normale supérieure de Paris and are currently working as Senior Researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. Their video essays and desktop
documentaries explore the intersections between cinema and online media, with a particular interest in questions related to modes of spectatorship, gestures of appropriation and mediated memory. They have taught courses and workshops at various universities and art schools, most recently at the University of Massachusetts, the Beaux-Arts de Marseille and the California Institute of the Arts.

**Theresa Heath** is a post-doctoral researcher at Loughborough University, London, researching disabled access at film and cultural festivals and events. She has published articles and chapters on women's and queer film festivals, representations of chronic illness in cinema, and is currently completing a book titled *Queer Film Festivals and Urban Space: Remaking the City* to be published in 2024.

Kate Ince is Professor of French and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She has published books on the performance artist Orlan (Orlan, millennial female, Berg 2000), on French filmmakers Georges Franju (Georges Franju, Manchester University Press, 2005; in French as Georges Franju: au-delà du cinéma fantastique, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2008) and Mia Hansen-Løve (The Cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve: candour and vulnerability, Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and developed a feminist phenomenological approach to women's cinema in *The Body and the Screen: female subjectivities in contemporary women's cinema* (Bloomsbury plc, 2017). She has just completed an essay that employs psychology and phenomenology in conjunction with Céline Sciamma's *Petite maman* (2021).

**Andrea Inzerillo** is the artistic director of the Sicilia Queer Filmfest. He has translated and edited the Italian edition of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Lipovetsky, Pierre Bayard, Madame de Staël, Douglas Sirk. He also recently edited the book *Atlante del Cinema Queer Contemporaneo. Europa 2000-2020 / Atlas of Contemporary Queer Cinema. Europe 2000-2020*, published by Meltemi (Milano, 2023). A teacher of history and
308 philosophy in high schools, he has recently been a post-doctoral research fellow in cinema at the University of Palermo. He collaborates with periodicals such as *Alias – Il manifesto*, *Fata Morgana*, *Gli Asini*.

**Hervé Joubert-Laurencin** is Professor of Cinema Aesthetics at the University Paris Nanterre (France) and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research includes Pasolini's work (films, theatre, literature, politics and poetry, including translations into French), André Bazin's writings (Écrits com-plets, Paris, Macula, 2018), other écrivains de cinéma such as Jean-Claude Biette, Barthélemy Amengual, Serge Daney, André Martin, Glauber Rocha, and Animation theory. He realizes films with Marianne Dautrey (Bazin roman, 2018, Fontaine. Trente-trois minutes à la documenta fifteen, 2023) and is currently working on a long-term creative and research project focusing on four subversive filmmakers: Pasolini, Rocha, Fassbinder and Oshima.

**Philipp Dominik Keidl** is Assistant Professor of Screen Media in Transition at Utrecht University. His research on fandom, material culture, and film heritage is published in *Journal of Cinema and Media Studies*, *Film Criticism*, *Journal of Popular Culture*, and *The Moving Image*. He is the co-editor of "Institutionalizing Moving Image Archival Training" (Synoptique 6.1, 2018), *Pandemic Media* (meson press, 2020), "Fandom Histories" (Transformative Works and Cultures 37, 2022) and *Platforms and the Moving Image* (meson press, forthcoming).

**Simon Pageau** is a film critic. At university, between 2017 and 2019, he worked on *Trafic*, the magazine created by Serge Daney in the early 1990s; then he co-founded a magazine, *Apaches*, whose first issues, published between 2020 and 2023, were partly devoted to classic American cinema. He is currently working on a book on *Dodes'kaden* by Akira Kurosawa.

**Sylvie Pierre-Ulmann** was a critic for *Cahiers du cinéma* in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been a teacher, editor, translator, and member of *Trafic's* editorial board from the foundation of the
journal in 1991 until its final issue in 2021. She edited Glauber Rocha, *Textes et entretiens de Glauber Rocha*, Paris, Éditions de l'Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1987 and published « *Frontière chinoise* » de John Ford, Crisnée, Yellow Now, 2014.

**Bamchade Pourvali** holds a doctorate in Film Studies and has taught at the École Polytechnique and Gustave Eiffel University. He is the author of *Chris Marker* (Cahiers du cinéma, 2003), *Godard neuf zéro, les films des années 90 de Jean-Luc Godard* (Séguier, 2006) and *Wong Kar-wai, la modernité d'un cinéaste asiatique* (L'Amandier, 2007). His latest book is *L'essai au cinéma, de Chaplin à Godard* (Créaphis, 2023). Also a specialist in Iranian cinema, he runs the "Iran ciné panorama" website (www.irancinepanorama.fr).

**Patrice Rollet** is an essayist and film critic, an editor and teacher, and was a member of *Trafic*'s editorial board from its foundation by Serge Daney in 1991 up to its final issue in 2021. Literary director of *Cahiers du cinéma* in the 1990s, his publications include a collective book on John Ford (1990), the writings of James Agee (1991) and Stanley Cavell. For Editions P.O.L., in addition to his own books, he edited the writings of Manny Farber, Jonas Mekas, and the four volumes of the *La Maison cinéma et le monde* (2001-2015) collection of Serge Daney's articles. Latest publication: *Descentes aux limbes*, Éditions P.O.L, 2019.

**Marc Siegel** is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His research and publications focus mainly on issues in queer studies and experimental film. His book *A Gossip of Images* is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He has also been active internationally as a freelance curator for film series, programs and performance festivals. He is a member of the Academy of World Arts and Culture in Cologne and the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP. He is currently working on a book about bathrooms in film and video.

**Marcos Uzal** has been editor-in-chief of *Cahiers du cinéma* since May 2020. He was a member of the board and then the editorial board of *Trafic* magazine, a critic for *Libération* newspaper and
310 a member of *Vertigo* magazine. He has co-edited books on *Tod Browning* (2007), *Jerzy Skolimowski* (2013) and *Guy Gilles* (2014), and is the author of an essay on Jacques Tourneur's *I Walked With a Zombie* (2006), for the Côté Film collection (Yellow Now Editions), which he directed from 2006 to 2020. He was also film programer at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris from 2010 to 2020.
Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince and Marc Siegel (eds.)

Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia

French critic Serge Daney was a central figure in film, television and media criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. He died of AIDS in 1992, just as the concept of queer cinema entered international film studies and just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film culture. This collection of new essays investigates the legacy of Daney's work alongside considerations of feminist, queer and digital cinephilia and contemporary practices of film curation.

konfigurationen-des-films.de

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meson press

ISBN 978-3-95796-018-4

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9 783957 960184

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