For the love of films

IT'S only day four and already there are people staggering around this town, with ink black sacks under their eyes and crazed expressions. They're movie buffs, and the Dublin Film Festival is their hunting ground. Twenty four thousand tickets have already been sold, and 31,000 people are expected to have bought tickets before the madness ends today week.

And still the venerable American critic Susan Sontag covered a page of last Saturday's Guardian sounding off about the death of "cinephilia" - and the contingent decadence of the art of film, as it celebrates its centenary.

"Cinephilia," explains Sontag, is "the name of the very specific love that cinema inspired": "Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the sense that cinema was an art unlike any other; quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral - all at the same time.

Controversially, Sontag celebrates what some might see as the cross eyed obsessiveness of true cinephiles: "Cinema had apostles (it was like religion). Cinema was a crusade. Cinema was a world view. Lovers of poetry or opera of dance don't think there is only poetry or opera or dance. But lovers of cinema could think there was only cinema."

Cinemas have lost their cachet as the only place that a particular type of mirror image of reality can be found, she says. Now everywhere, there are moving images - on TVs, on disco walls, on public buildings. This, she says, "has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art at its most serious and for cinema as popular, entertainment.

"The reduction of cinema to assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more attention grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, light weight cinema that doesn't command anyone's attention." Market forces have thus not hampered the turning of cinema into an "industry", helped by the reprise in production costs during the last decade.

Surely this view betrays an unreconstructed romanticism? Sontag says that true cinephile's fell in love with popular, as well as art films in the past; but did they really respond to popular culture when it was contemporary, or are bad old films more kosher now than bad new films, because they are viewed through a retro fog?

Did cinephilia ever exist like it does among the young with disposable incomes of Dublin this week? And is the isolation of an art form from other art, and from life, really a good thing?