Towards a Genealogy of Cinephilic History: Media Archaeology and Chinese Digital Cinephilia

This paper aims to highlight a genealogical turn in cinephilia and its history today, and to show how media archaeology can serve as a key method within this turn.

Cinephilia does not simply refer to the “love of cinema”. Traditionally, it signifies an impassioned, but discriminating, fervour for films that originated from film societies and clubs of post-war France, which is often regarded as cinephilia’s point of origin. However, recent scholarship has called for a decentralisation of this narrative, questioning whether such linear and historically bounded approaches not only adopt a passive and defensive stance towards digital technology, but also inadvertently reinforce traditional cultural centres in Western Europe and North America (Navitski 2024). For instance, Jean Ma (2025) summarises recent research on Hong Kong cinephilia in the 1960s and 1970s that intervenes in cinephilic historiography by reframing it within “the thick fabrics of social relations, everyday life, spatial practices, economic systems, ideologies, and structures of feeling”. This approach shifts attention away from particular films or genres and towards audiences and cinephilia’s local histories.

This paper examines Chinese online film commentaries, focusing in particular on early BBS platforms, university forums, and other Web 2.0 cinephilic spaces, many of which now persist as fragmented forms of “dead media”. I argue that media archaeology enables us to move beyond nostalgic narratives of a “lost” internet, allowing for a genealogical analysis of how power relations, user practices, and cultural hierarchies were negotiated on these early media materials. Ultimately, this paper asks how we might write a history of cultural practices from an archive that is inherently unstable and incomplete, thereby contributing to a decolonial turn in digital humanities and film studies.