Vol. 19 No. 1 (2025): Good taste tested. Metamorphoses of literary cinephilia
Edited by Fabien Dubosson et Maaike Koffeman
Is there a specifically literary way of loving cinema? The question deserves to be asked, because while the relationship between the seventh art and literature is now a field of research in its own right, the status of the writer as a ‘cinephile’ has been examined less often than the role of adaptation or the figure of the writer-cinematographer. Yet cinephilia is so insistent in the French literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that we can speak, following Fabien Gris, of a veritable ‘literary cinephilia’. The many expressions of this are to be found in essays and criticism, autobiographical and intimate writings, poetry and, of course, fiction. What's more, this cinephilia has never ceased to metamorphose, taking on different values as a function of technical developments in the medium, but also of changes in the meaning of the term “cinephilia” itself and the issues associated with it. Above all, cinephile writers have contributed to the war of “tastes” that has most often accompanied the affirmation of cinema as an art form in its own right. It is this evolution of “literary cinephilia” and the configurations that have made it possible that this issue of Relief would like to map out - obviously partially, but based on contrasting and perhaps unexpected examples.
