Persian bookstores promote “The New Cinephilia”
TEHRAN –(Iranart)- A Persian translation of Girish Shambu’s latest book “The New Cinephilia (Kino-Agora)” has recently come into the Persian bookstores across Iran.
Lega is the publisher of the Persian version translated by Navid Purmohammadreza.
Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today’s “new cinephilia” and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated.
Each activity of today’s cinephilic practice – viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films – is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet.
As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today’s cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation.
Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models.
This book both describes and theorizes how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today.
Shambu is a cinephile and Associate Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He runs a community-oriented film blog named “girish” at girishshambu.blogspot.com, and co-edits, with Adrian Martin, the online cinema journal LOLA. His writings have appeared in “Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media”, Artforum.com, Cineaste and in the collection “Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 1: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture”.
In an introduction to cinephilia, Shambu wrote, “As a cinephile, the Internet is where I find my mediators every day: on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, magazines, journals and other sites.”
“Placing myself in the path of these mediators, these waves of thought and creation and reflection that are swirling around me daily, I am swept up by them.
“Several times a day, they carry me, bounce me, from one image to another, one essay to another, one idea to another, one spark of curiosity to another. But there is more to this experience than simply surfing from one link to another in a state of perpetual motion.
“How does this movement—this daily proliferation of encounters—power one’s cinephilia? What special affective charge does this experience hold? In other words, how is the experience of the Internet cinephile effectively different from that of a ‘traditional’ cinephile who spends little time online?”
source: Tehran Times