" "

Many of our ideas about how cinema works and what a filmmaker is grow out of an idea of gesture and intention.  This is understandable: in the 20th century, cinema brought some of the grandest gestures in history. . . . In turn, we came to understand and attribute authorship in cinema based on obvious gestures.  The theories that form the foundation of both filmmaking and film criticism concern themselves not with small or subjective properties, but with grand designs: montage, mise-en-scene, camera movement, framing.  All of these things could be called the "obvious properties of style."

Cinephilia set itself aside from mere film buffery by becoming the hunt for small moments and small films, things that appeared to exist outside the realm of obvious gesture.  Criticism sought to explain the tracking shot; cinephilia looked for the meanings of drifting cigarette smoke, stray glances and apparent accidents, and to divine the patterns of hats, cars, and donkeys.

--Ignatiy Vishnevetsky