In this essay, I finally come out of the celluloid closet as an involuntary daydreamer. I have no greater pleasure as a cinephile than to let my mind wander—enfolded in otherworldly voices and transported by fluid cinematography to enter another realm. What is cinema if not a radical experiment in simultaneously existing elsewhere? Unfortunately, understanding movies is also my job, so I have to be ruthlessly accountable for the swirling orbit of filmographic factoids and comprehensible subtext, not to mention the imperative to provide a basic account of a film untainted by associative inner ramblings. The wager of pleasure in the history of film theory has been staked on precisely this problem. In this short essay, I draw on feminist film theories of creative spectatorship, incomplete archives, and speculative historiography to argue that cinematic pleasure can be political on one’s own terms.
Maggie Hennefeld (Wed,) studied this question.