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Hanstke, Tamar

University of British Columbia

What do we talk about when we talk about cinephilia? Until recently, we did not talk about it much at all in academic film studies: there is a longstanding bias against cinephilia in academia, and this has led to a noticeable gap in our literature. In this thesis, I seek to fill a niche within this gap by analyzing the representation of cinephiles in six primary film texts: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" (2015); Todd Strauss-Schulson’s "The Final Girls" (2015); Wes Craven’s "Scream" (1996); Yorgos Lanthimos’ "Dogtooth" (2009); Chandlwrighter Levack’s "I Like Movies" (2022); and Bernardo Bertolucci’s "The Dreamers" (2003). I analyze these films through the lenses of genre film theory, spectatorship theory, and developmental psychology, ultimately arguing for the cinephilic film as an emerging subgenre in cinema: the cinephilm. In arguing for the validity of the cinephilm as a distinctive subgenre, I draw on such genre film theorists as Robert Altman, David Bordwell, John G. Cawelti, Carol Clover, Barry Keith Grant, and Linda Williams to sketch a history of the genre film, and then identify how the cinephilm both draws on this tradition and disrupts it. In particular, I examine how the cinephilm productively interacts with such established genres as the teen film, the horror film, and the arthouse film, while failing to reaffirm dominant ideology in the way that is so characteristic of the genre film. The cinephilm’s resistance to dominant ideology creates an interesting contradiction in terms of representation: all of the cinephile characters examined in this thesis are white and heterosexual, and the majority are male, an apparently clear case of a group of films that do not prioritize racial, sexual, and/or gender diversity. I thereby draw upon alternative modes of spectatorship proposed by Carol Clover, bell hooks, and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as Erik Erikson’s model of psychosocial development, to conceive of these films as diverse in an alternative way, presenting psychologically complex characters who provide a uniquely cinephile-addressed mode of representation. Possessing both generic conventions and an audience, the cinephilm is ultimately justified as an emerging subgenre.

Text

2023-08-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85712

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/