Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Ardor and Anxiety: The History of Cinephilia
2. Enchanting Images
3. Cinephilia and Technology: Anxieties and Obsolescence
4. The Exquisite Apocalypse
Conclusion: Anxious Times, Anxious Cinema
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Sarah Keller is associate professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Columbia, 2014) and the coeditor of Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (2012).

Reviews

Anxious Cinephilia is a remarkably balanced and inclusive take on our affection for images and related apprehensions.
*Spectrum Culture*

Anxious Cinephilia gives us the most far-reaching theorization of cinephilia yet. This exploration of desire and anxiety as twin impulses unearths novel connections across film cultures, affective states, and moments of technological change, from early cinema to cinematic spectacle in the digital era. Keller produces a fascinating remapping of the shifting relationship between the spectator and the beloved object and refashions cinephilia for our anxious times.
*Belén Vidal, author of Heritage Film: Nation, Genre, and Representation*

This quietly incendiary book makes a crucial intervention in the study of cinephilia by showing how the love of cinema has always been intertwined with anxiety. In embracing an expansive and historicized sense of cinephilia, it stands as an important corrective to previous scholarship that has far too often privileged French postwar auteurist film culture. A brilliant and ambitious work that will help spark a thousand cinema conversations.
*Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia*

If the x-axis of cinephile is love, then the y-axis—as Sarah Keller convincingly shows—is anxiety, fear, worry. With an acute sensitivity to the historical, phenomenological, technological, and generic ways in which this love/anxiety gets triggered, Keller provocatively deepens our understanding of the powerful, mysterious, multifaceted phenomenon we call cinephilia—and, importantly, she convincingly shows that cinephilia is not just a thing of the past but is still very much with us. Every cinephile will read this book with layers of emotional recognition.
*Christian Keathley, author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees*

Anxious Cinephilia is a meta-textual job well-done.
*Senses of Cinema*

Anxious Cinephilia provides a great departure point for readers to formulate their own cinephilic inquiries.
*Cineaste*