Cinephilia and the Aestheticization of Film. Cultural Legitimacy Before and After

The history of cinema is characterized by the fight for cultural legitimacy. Specifically, in the 20thcentury, cinema played a key role for the expansion of the aesthetic field in debates on contemporarytimes and even influenced the philosophy of art. Aesthetic categories are taken from other and moretraditionalartisticforms(suchasrepresentativearts,literatureandtheatre). Thepurposeistoexpandthefieldofculturallegitimacyofcinemaalsotothosefieldswhichwereconsideredtooinvolvedintheindustrial needs. This is the reason why contemporary cinephilia have sometimes extended the broaddefinitionof“beautiful”alsotomoremarginalareasaswellastothemostunpredictableplaces(frompornography to horror), thus identifying forms of art everywhere. So, what is cinephilia and how didit revolutionize the aesthetic criteria of cinema?