Outsider Features: American Independent Films of the 1980s, Vol. 52 Book

I have such mixed feelings about this entire book. On one hand, I appreciate Keathley's broad impetus: to rescue cinema studies scholars from their own hypocrisy, to suggest that the faux-cinephobic "rigorous skepticism" of High Theory ought to be replaced with an academically-minded subjectivity. This is potentially freeing, and potentially helpful.

On the other hand, Keathley's obsession with "cinephiliac moments" seems to not only stem from a severely limited definition of cinephilia, but to take over the entire book. "Look!" he seems to practically cry, "All of these other famous and well-known film thinkers fetishize privileged moments of unscripted and unplanned reality breaking into the mind of the viewer, just like me!" As a film lover less often fixated with cinephilic moments than Keathley, he felt a bit like an academic drawing from the voices of other, world-renown academics to justify the validity of his own intense emotional experiences and personal preferences. This said, it's to Keathley's credit as a scholar that he accomplishes some impressively nuanced resuscitations of thinkers like Bazin in the process.

However, enumerating the (often philosophical/ontological) reasons that cinephilic moments have and should be appreciated cannot not argue for why they're good for cinema studies beyond a general, theoretical register-and Keathley's examples of cinephilic moments used as diving board into pools of prose does little to fix this problem. His "cinephiliac anecdotes," relying, as they often do, on homonymic associations, carry a rhetorical power and allow for free-floating connections: interesting thematic topics arrive, conceptual links are made. It's good reading. But these anecdotes feel more like excerpts from essays-in-the-making than texts with serious academic weight.

Therefore, it seems like Keathley leads us to an interesting place: forcing us Film Studies folks to determine the academic value of The Essay as a mode of thinking, feeling, and researching; as something both subjective and objective; as a way to bring together the personal and the theoretical, the concrete and the abstract. And this is a curious lack in the text. There's little discussion of Adorno's "The Essay As Form," no mention of essays by luminaries like Sontag, Kael, Haskel, or Phillip Lopate. Keathley might respond to this critique by saying that those writers are neither theoretically nor historically driven to a degree that makes their work viable for cinema studies: there's a reason their work is Literary, not Academic. It's TOO subjective. But this would be a slightly strange position to be adopted by someone so committed to resuscitating subjectivity within academic film studies. How subjective is TOO subjective, really?

Keathley is diving into turbulent, difficult waters here-right in middle of the gap between subjectivity and objectivity, analysis and opinion, the academic and the literary, memoir and research paper. And I admire him for doing this. But as a writer of essay, memoir, and straight-up academic work, I have no personal problem bifurcating my straight-up academic work (even if the objects of analysis were inspired by "cinephilic moments"-like a recent essay about modernism and Hollywood Film inspired by a few small cubist paintings in Kiss Me Deadly) and my academically/conceptually-inflected creative nonfiction. I think both forms are equally viable: sometimes it's okay to prioritize argument over subjective experience (if poststructuralism teaches us anything, it's that subjectivity isn't going away any time soon!), and sometimes it's okay to inflect an account of your subjectivity with academic/historical/concepual bits. And sometimes it's okay to-as I attempted with my most recent book-give the conceptual and the personal equal weight, to bring them both to bear upon each other.

The real, pressing questions, for a book published by an academic press for a primarily academic audience, have to be: what kind of mode of production is and ought to be valuable for the academic community? What counts as scholarship, and what counts as personal indulgence? Should we separate literary writing from academic writing, and, if so, how? Why? Are we simply creating distinctions in cultural capital, or are there some sincere and useful pedagogical limits and structures at play here? What should those pedagogical rubrics entail? This is the roaring river of subtext that runs below Keathley's work-and it is to this river that academics and institutions must, if we're to take his provocative work seriously, attend.