The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred debate over what it means to be a “cinephile.” Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images.

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).

Christian Keathley, author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees:
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.

Girish Shambu, author of The New Cinephilia:
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.

Belén Vidal, author of Heritage Film: Nation, Genre, and Representation:
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.