Yesterday, a new component of the annual Edinburgh International Film Festival made its appearance on the internet in association with Mubi. Alongside its usual programming, the EIFF has this year concocted a virtual counterpart, Project: New Cinephilia. If all goes according to plan, it looks like interview and Q&A content from the EIFF itself will spill over into this additional space, with the aim of producing conversation about the future of film appreciation.
From the site’s Curatorial Statement:
Panels and conferences about the art of film criticism have, in recent years, tended to focus on either the so-called “death” of traditional criticism or the role criticism has come to assume in the age of blogs and digital technologies…
So in response to the sturm und drang, Project: New Cinephilia will ask:
What does it mean to be a cinephile in the 21st century? How has film discourse adapted to today’s environment? What is the impact of the other arts on film writing? How are we naturally equipped to “read” a film? What are best practices for teaching film appreciation? How have new modes of distribution affected what we see and how we interpret film?
Which are all, you know, essentially the same questions that led to Filmwell. So far they have posted an extended meditation on contemporary cinephilia from Girish, which I hope will set the tone for the project as a whole:
The key action now is to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to get into something, join something larger, more powerful than ourselves. These big waves that Deleuze is urging us to join, to ride, to be taken up by, he calls mediators.
Deleuze is saying: It is up to us to enter these waves around us, to place ourselves in the path of these mediators, these waves of thought and creation and reflection that are swirling all around us every day. For him, the more we think, work and live in isolation, the more difficult it is for us to move forward simply of our own accord. But with the help of mediators, we can get caught up in forces much bigger, stronger than ourselves, and they can help us do and think things we could never have done or thought on our own.
This, to me, is a great model for the way the Internet functions at its best. As a cinephile, the Internet is where I find my big waves — my mediators — every single day: on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, magazines, journals, and other sites. Several times a day they carry me from one idea to another, one film to another, one spark of curiosity to another.