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The Death of Cinema
===================

Fifteen years ago, Susan Sontag said that cinema is dead.[1] She
bemoaned both the corruption of the filmmaking process --- that the
Hollywood machine all but crushes the spirit of artistic pursuit --- and
the passing of its appreciation, which she deems "cinephilia." The
former sentiment, more or less, has gained widespread acceptance; we all
see both the distinction between "Hollywood movies" and "independent
films," and the powerful advantage the mainstream holds over its
outsiders. The latter, while equally as true, is something more
abstract, requiring a wider lens of consideration.

With images of "Twi-hard" throngs losing all rational ability and
fanboys doing their best to fill up the internet with hype in the
lead-up to films like WATCHMEN, INCEPTION and SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE
WORLD, it's easy to say that cinephilia is alive and well. However, when
one compares this with the kinds of films Sontag references (BREATHLESS,
THE 400 BLOWS, PERSONA, etc.) one ought to be filled with a sort of
melancholy. Sontag laments:

	It's not that you can't look forward anymore to new films that
	you can admire. But such films not only have to be exceptions
	--- that's true of great achievements in any art. They have to
	be actual violations of the norms and practices that now govern
	movie making everywhere.

If one recent film calls to mind Sontag's cinematic "violation," it is
I'M STILL HERE, a film that challenges the form such that its audience
and critics are, for the majority, left confused. For film criticism,
challenging cinema behaves like a Darwinian sieve, separating out the
dilettantes and loudmouth attention-seekers from the true cinephiliac
critics. Cinema is like religion: when it speaks, it demands a level of
submission and quiet to be heard, the reward being a dissolution of
individual isolation and consciousness in exchange for a profound sense
of oneness. But like anything that requires submission and humility,
some will be too drunk on their own self-importance to hear; they will
sit in petrified confusion, isolated from the herd, and they will lash
out to denigrate the film, hoping to draw someone else out from the
blind. The method is easy --- rejecting a difficult film to join the
chorus of disparagement requires no submission or humility on the part
of the viewer. But as with all easy routes, history proves the great
equaliser; a cinephile takes solace in reading the early negative
reviews of RAGING BULL or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Perhaps the sieve
analogy is less than apt, because there's a third category for those who
sit on the fence, too afraid to commit their whole opinion lest they be
wrong, too afraid to proclaim love for a film lest they be heartbroken.
And this fence seats more than the those it divides. What's missing is
what Sontag describes: *cinephilia*. Without love, there is no courage
to step out into the void before others have already provided the
critical foundation and champion a challenging film.

While critics may not be immune to the death of cinephilia, they are not
its arbiters; this virus in cinema runs much deeper. On Christmas Day,
2008, at a Philadelphia cinema showing of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN
BUTTON James Joseph Cialella asked some other patrons to stop talking
during the film. They didn't. The situation escalated until Cialella
took out the .380-caliber handgun he had (brought tucked in the
waistband of his sweatpants) and shot one of the talkers in the arm.[2]
Cialella then went back to watching the film until the police arrived.
In the wake of this shooting, the story was received as a kind of joke,
the same way people throw around "President Palin" with a kind of shaky
certainty that the world could never really become that bad. Not really.
While it must be noted that Cialella is an Iraq War veteran and this is
likely to have been a contributing factor to the way he handled the
matter, the flip-side of that coin is that a cinema theatre represents
not the median of society but its cross section --- while Cialella may
not be average, he's not unique. When the inventors of cinema first
decided to bring people together in a darkened room to experience
cinematic oneness, they rightly never took considerations for shootouts.
Something has changed. Where once we would sit with a crowd of
strangers, let the lights go down, and open up our hearts and minds to
this glowing rectangular deity, now an innocence has been lost.

Yesterday I saw 8½ at the Art Gallery of NSW. A while before that it was
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and BADLANDS before that. This is a concise list
of the cinematic masterpieces I have seen recently with a public
audience. This kind of experience is not one I'm eager to repeat. During
BADLANDS, in response to the disconnection between Holly's voiceover and
the onscreen scenes, the audience laughed --- to them Terrence Malick's
exploration of Holly's romantic illusions about the Bonnie & Clyde
self-modelled tragedy was too confusing. Then in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY,
when Dave is dismantling HAL's mind, reducing the apparently self-aware
computer to something akin to a retarded child (HAL sings a lullaby
called "Daisy"), the audience, failing to see any connection between
this scene and the opening act in which mankind first discovers tools,
laughed. The third act of Fellini's 8½ was interrupted when an
altercation broke out in the back rows --- “You’ve been talking through
the whole movie!”

What happened to the submission and the quiet? Not in the sense of
refraining from talking, but in the deeper sense of being experientially
open? It's not limited to, as some would put it, a lack of manners
(although a lack of manners allows the behaviour to continue). The
reaction isn't hard to understand: people, in isolated confusion and
fear, will attempt to quell such uncomfortable feelings by sinking to
instinctive pleas for community; they'll make open dismissals of the
film by laughing or talking or making those annoying overt sighs of
annoyance --- all of this signal to others in the audience, who, also
scared of their own confusion, respond in kind. Soon the relief of
solidarity trounces the shame of incomprehension, and actually negates
it: if everyone is stupid, then no-one is.

To draw another parallel between cinema and religion, cinema requires
that one acknowledge something greater than themselves --- but when did
you last meet someone who thought themselves not the greatest of all
things? If they're great enough for 590 people to pay attention to their
Facebook statuses, why should they pay attention to this silly cinema
"masterpiece"? We live in a world where the notion that one may have
room for personal improvement is outright insulting; where direct
reprimand is so foreign to the average person that a man can continue to
believe he's doing nothing wrong until such point as he gets shot; where
Hollywood believes that cinema can be catered to *what audiences want*,
making multibillion-dollar studios into insecure sycophants offering up
new factory-line film product like a character preparing for a big date
might hold up outfits --- "Do you like this one? What do you think of
this one?" --- all of this part of a system that generates increasing
opposition against the flimsy and intangible truce of the darkened room.
But this is the only place where cinema lives.

When incompetent film critics are paid to spew their ignorant vitriol,
and three hundred people can't sit in silence through a Kubrick film,
maybe the era of cinema is over?


-- 
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/magazine/the-decay-of-cinema.html
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/12/27/movie.shooting/index.html