On the Pleasures of Cinema and Daydreaming

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.