Cinema and Pleasure: An Introduction

There has been no concept as foundational as pleasure in the history of film studies and film theory in particular. During the 1970s, film scholars debated pleasure as a deeply ambivalent promise, some finding it an outright synonym for the self-delusion and alienation driven by the market forces that shape commercial cinema’s narrative language and ideological apparatus. Today, scholars and cinephiles alike are still haunted by an unresolved, latent preoccupation with the issue of collective and individual pleasure. This dossier investigates the matter on a global scale, working from the nineteenth century to the present. Spanning the joys of criticism and critique, lost archives of queer fandom, transgressive genres of eroticism, and film theories of daydreaming and escapism, the six essays of the dossier intervene in the discourse around cinema pleasure by revealing its forgotten genealogies and wayward potentials.