The End of Cinema?

A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age

André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion, Timothy Barnard

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539388
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Is a film watched on a video screen still cinema? Have digital compositing, motion capture, and other advanced technologies remade or obliterated the craft? Rooted in their hypothesis of the "double birth of media," André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion take a positive look at cinema's ongoing digital revolution and reaffirm its central place in a rapidly expanding media landscape.

The authors begin with an overview of the extreme positions held by opposing camps in the debate over cinema: the "digitalphobes" who lament the implosion of cinema and the "digitalphiles" who celebrate its new, vital incarnation. Throughout, they remind readers that cinema has never been a static medium but a series of processes and transformations powering a dynamic art. From their perspective, the digital revolution is the eighth major crisis in the history of motion pictures, with more disruptions to come. Brokering a peace among all sides, Gaudreault and Marion emphasize the cultural practice of cinema over rigid claims on its identity, moving toward a common conception of cinema to better understand where it is headed next.

Chapter One

Cinema Is Not What It Used to Be

“Cinema” … is dead. What happened to it?

ROGER BOUSSINOT, LE CINÉMA EST MORT. VIVE LE CINÉMA!, 1967

More than any other art, the cinema has died repeatedly and with great regularity over the course of its relatively brief … existence.

STEFAN JOVANOVIC, “THE ENDING(S) OF CINEMA: NOTES ON THE RECURRENT DEMISE OF THE SEVENTH ART,” 2003

Some people see the crisis cinema finds itself in the midst of today as a mild foreshadowing of its death, visible on the horizon. The various heralds of the “death” of cinema do not generally believe in its true death, in any real cessation of its vital activity. In the context of the digital turn, the “death” foretold is indicative, rather, of the medium’s decline within the great chorus of media and also of the end of a situation in which cinema exercised an across-the-board hegemony. This is what is in the process of dying, not the medium itself. What we are experiencing today is the end of cinema’s supremacy in the vast kingdom of the moving image. This is the sense with which the term is used by the British novelist Will Self in an investigation he carried out for an article published in 2010, “Cut! That’s All Folks.” Recalling one of his dialogues with his colleague Jonathan Coe, Self remarks: “‘Film is dead,’ I said. ‘By which I don’t mean that people aren’t making films, or that other people aren’t watching them—it’s just that film is no longer the dominant narrative medium, its near century-long hegemony over the imaginations of the greater part of the world’s population has ended.’”¹

The death of cinema is thus clearly likened to the end of its hegemony—a hegemony, moreover, of a certain kind: its domination is carried out through its narrative mode, the same mode the institution chose, over other possible modes (such as the attractional mode, for example), to establish as the standard with respect to cinema’s identity.² In light of this reasoning, we might conclude that although cinema is moribund on the narrative level it demonstrates considerable vitality on the level of special effects, in particular because of the new possibilities that digital technology provides it.

Continuing his musings, Self reports that his literary agent, asked her opinion of this death foretold, expressed the hope that cinema end up like the theater, that it become “a secondary medium … but still a revered one.” Understood in the sense of the end of its hegemony, the end of cinema would thus not necessarily mean a qualitative impoverishment (even though veneration gives off the musty smell of embalming and mummification). Concerning this lost hegemony, Self adds that cinema is still making excellent films, but that what has been lost forever is its “cultural preeminence”:

When I eavesdrop on [my children] goofing out with their friends, I have no sense of film’s centrality for them; instead they are at the vortex of so much full-motion imagery—on TVs, computer screens, games consoles, CCTV, 3G phones—that the silver screen hovers only in their mid-distance, a ghostly presence unless animated by the next big, novelty spectacle.³

What we take away from this is that cinema needs the big screen to exist and that what is shown on other screens is just a vortex of moving images. In this context, for cinema to escape its relative media anonymity and recover its precedence it must return to the days of the “big spectacle” (which is precisely what it is in the process of doing with the powerful return of 3D and the proliferation of extravaganzas).

The decline of cinema and its loss of hegemony are topics that will recur frequently in the present volume, in which we will often address the question of hybrid moving images but also the difficulty—highly revelatory in our view—of finding an appropriate name, one that would achieve consensus, for this non-hegemonic-cinema-in-the-digital-era. What has incontestably changed today is that cinema no longer has exclusive claim on our heart and is having a lot of trouble getting over the fact. What is more, it “no longer has exclusivity when it comes to moving images,” in the words of Jacques Aumont, who goes on to add that “the dispossession process began more than half a century ago with television.”⁴ The movie theater’s loss of hegemony has become a central question for viewers of course, but also for creators. This can be seen in a highly significant conversation Will Self reports having with David Lynch:

Production has become so wilfully corrupted [but also] dissemination. Last year I spoke to David Lynch—a true auteur—about the reasons why he had distributed his latest film, Inland Empire, himself: “I love the film, Will,” he told me, “but theatrical is dying, DVD sales are going down—it’s all going to the internet, and it got caught up in this. Besides, it’s three hours long, Will, and no one understood it.” Then he began to hymn the virtues of what he termed “a perfect screening, in a quiet movie theatre, with great sound—because then you can really go into that world.” He sighed about the loss of movie theatres: “It’s a sadness.” It is, and the sadness is at the loss of a specifically collective experience.⁵

In the end, then, cinema’s decline is accompanied by a loss of its social significance, in particular through the drop in movie theater attendance. The American essayist Susan Sontag remarked the same loss of social significance in a famous article on the decline of cinema back in 1996, a loss she associated with the disappearance of cinephilia—an affection (and an affectation) that grows in movie theaters. Without the aura cinephilia confers upon it, this dying cinema is a kind of hollow medium. And if by some chance it were to be reborn someday, it would be, for Sontag, through this cinephiliac passion: “The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film…. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers…. If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too…. If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.”⁶

Investigation into the R.I.P. Effect

This commonplace of the death of cinema recurs with remarkable frequency throughout film history. Yet it is easy to see that it has never been as present as it has since the turn of our new century. So much so that the new century saw the publication of numerous books calling into doubt cinema’s survival or musing about its future. Paolo Cherchi Usai got the ball rolling in 2001 with a book that set the tone and didn’t beat around the bush with its cold title The Death of Cinema.⁷ The rest of the decade gave us much of the same: after Cherchi Usai a group of scholars in 2003 asked the question “Where is cinema headed?” in a special issue of the French journal Cinergon edited by Maxime Scheinfeigel, providing an early survey of what in cinema was in the process of disappearing.⁸ They announced that the “collective viewer” was in the process of being transformed into a mere reader.⁹ As François Amy de la Brèteque remarked in a review of this journal issue, “The conclusion one draws from this nuanced and stimulating group of texts may be that cinema still exists but questions around its relations with reality, its representation of time and the role of the viewer are in the process of shifting considerably.”¹⁰ These three questions address three aspects of the considerable changes taking place in the constellation cinema within the digital galaxy: seizing and encoding reality; the “digitalized” time of moving images;¹¹ and the greater diversity of products on offer to the viewer or, more generally, to users of filmic media.

In 2007 photo-realism and digital encoding were, precisely, at the center of the concerns of the American scholar D. N. Rodowick (who was also a contributor to the issue of Cinergon mentioned above).¹² In a book entitled The Virtual Life of Film,¹³ Rodowick attempts to define what we might describe as cinema’s new mode of existence. He believes that an image recorded digitally no longer creates causality or photo-realist contingency; it creates only illusion. From indexicality we necessarily pass to simulacrum when the captured image is immediately transcoded and converted into discrete and modular units. Hence for Rodowick it is impossible for what he calls the “digital event” to achieve duration even when the movement present in the image is perfect.

Let us return to Europe, in 2009, with an edited volume entitled, in a properly resolute manner, Oui, c’est du cinéma (Yes, It’s Cinema), in which Philippe Dubois—who earlier urged us to adopt an extended and extendable conception of cinema—proclaims loud and clear that cinema is everywhere:

More and more, cinema is in museums, art galleries, the theater, the opera, the concert hall. In bars, cafés, restaurants, nightclubs. It is in offices, workplaces and places we pass through or wait in. It is in homes, in every room. It is in planes, trucks, taxis, trains and on train station platforms. On the walls of the city and our mobile phones.¹⁴

And so on and so forth. Then, that same year, the pendulum swung back the other way, over in North America this time, with Chuck Tryon and his volume Reinventing Cinema, in which he examines the impact that the passage to digital may have had on popular culture and tries to evaluate the extent to which film culture has been redefined by digital media.¹⁵ According to Tryon, our historical relations with film have radically changed. Up next, at the very end of the decade, is Dudley Andrew, who transformed Bazin’s famous question into a resounding assertion, What Cinema Is!, by attempting to define the essential “idea of cinema” (“an overriding conception that can be felt at every level of the film phenomenon”) that runs throughout the development of what has become our audiovisual culture.^16,17

Cinema That Isn’t Cinema

The song remains the same in a few books and lectures by major figures in the film studies field in the 2010s. To take just two examples of such lectures, we could mention that by James Lastra in November 2011, in which he went so far as to suggest that any definition of cinema is, in the end, only provisional, and that by Tom Gunning in May 2012, which suggested “Let’s Start Over: Why Cinema Hasn’t Yet Been Invented.”^18,19

Lastra, at the end of his talk, which addressed cinema’s media identity problems, arrived at a thoroughly “relativistic” position: “There are no autonomous media, only media embedded in changeable social and cultural frameworks. The contradiction between technological media—devices—and aesthetic media, and even within each, are an essential and defining feature of our media worlds, and the cause of their capacity to change.”²⁰

Gunning, for his part, adopts the proposal made by Bazin in the second version (in 1958) of his famous article “Le Mythe du cinéma total” (“The Myth of Total Cinema”).²¹ He suggests in particular that the answer to Bazin’s piercing question “What is cinema?” will never be answered because every technological innovation, at the same time as it lays out cinema’s future path, constantly brings it back to the idea that the people who conceived it had in the beginning. It should be noted that Gunning shares the genealogical conception of cinema that the present authors outlined in 2009, according to which crises and ruptures are an integral part of cinema’s storytelling identity:²²

The modernity of cinema entails cycles of both destruction and renewal. As a historian I defend preservation and memory against the sort of giddy amnesia the myth of progress engenders. But nostalgia and despair about the future can be as blinding as ignoring our past. History is created by bridging seemingly uncrossable ruptures (not ignoring, but incorporating their fissures)…. Thus our current moment of transition involves not just a vision of the future, but a dynamic sense of our past.²³

In a sense, we might view the vision that the “positive” historian Gunning develops, in the tradition of his self-avowed mentor André Bazin, as not incompatible with the idea of an extended cinema, or perhaps we should say extendable cinema. Indeed the diachronic extension found in Gunning is not unlike the synchronic extension of cinema claimed by Dubois (and company).²⁴ Like Bazin, Gunning displays optimism in history based on a tenacious belief in the constant renewal of this phoenix-like medium: “The apocalypse was not quite what we expected…. Tomorrow we may just have to start over.²⁵

Tension Around an Extension

To pin down the issue we are outlining here, we must make special room for two leading French authors who have been writing about film since the 1960s and who today are putting up resistance. The first is Raymond Bellour, the title of whose 2012 book, La Querelle des dispositifs (The Apparatus Dispute), is a good indication that film studies today is the site of burning theoretical discussions;²⁶ the second is Jacques Aumont, with his book Que reste-t-il du cinéma? (What Remains of Cinema?), published in 2013.

According to Bellour, the debate within film studies will rage around the question of the dividing line that needs to be established between what deserves to be called “cinema” and what perhaps may not. In this respect the subtitle of his book, Cinéma—installations, expositions (Cinema—Installations, Exhibitions), is a good indication of the contrast he wishes to set out, if we take him at ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction: The End of Cinema?
• 1. Cinema Is Not What It Used to Be
• 2. Digitalizing Cinema from Top to Bottom
• 3. A Brief Phenomenology of “Digitalized” Cinema
• 4. From Shooting to Filming: The Aufhebung Effect
• 5. A Medium Is Always Born Twice …
• 6. New Variants of the Moving Image
• 7. “Animage” and the New Visual Culture
• Conclusion: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Series List