Whither all of the postulations and polemics, so prevalent in our recent pre-millennial cultural moment, concerning the “death of cinema”?  It would seem only fair to ask, given that we currently appear to be witnessing a somewhat declining interest in this question relative to the proliferation of academic and journalistic discussions that only several years ago were urgently and authoritatively declaring the cinema’s end to be both imminent and inevitable.  The celluloid medium, film critics and cultural theorists alike were noting with no small alarm, is consigned to certain obsolescence, to be superseded shortly and rapidly by new digital technologies of production and presentation.  In the new millennium, their arguments went, one could expect that the mutation and convergence of moving image technologies (from HDTV and digital video to the Internet, CD-ROMs and other interactive media) would radically transform every aspect of the cinema from its mode of production to its aesthetics, referential logic, syntactic and narrative conventions, and especially our protocols of consumption and reception.  Film critics were mourning the demise of cinephilia, the greatly diminished accessibility, viability and cultural influence of foreign and experimental films attributable to the ever-strengthening hegemony of the multiplex theater and the Hollywood blockbuster with its spectacular special effects and computer-generated imagery.  Many of these points-of-view were neatly summed up by New York Press film critic Godfrey Cheshire when the following introduction to the second installment of his two-part article “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema” appeared in 1997:

Cheshire’s view of the cinema as undergoing such a profound crisis is certainly of a piece with the many other arguments that reopened the debate over the death of film within the context of the cinema’s fin de siècle centenary, each pointing to one or several real andor imminent economic, sociological, aesthetic and technological transformations within the realm of motion pictures; their discourse thus collectively put forth a multi-dimensional causal picture to which the end of cinema might be both anticipated and lamented.  My main purpose here will not be to dispute any of these arguments, however hyperbolic some of them might appear; indeed many of these commentaries manifest not only an awareness of developing currents in film technology but a solid and thorough knowledge of film history.  Moreover, for my part I am inclined to agree with many of the qualitative transformations in contemporary cinema that these writers have observed, even while as I write these words in the final days of 2002 it becomes apparent with the benefit of hindsight that Cheshire’s postulation of a wholesale upheaval in the art, science and economy of the moving image within a few short years would seem at best to have been premature.  The aim of the present discussion will be to map the territory of this most recent death-of-cinema debate, to unravel the various “end-isms” that are conflated therein, in order to analyze and situate these figures both in terms of their relation to a history of discourse on the cinema that has repeatedly viewed the demise of its object as imminent, and in terms of the teleological models that underpin this persistent tendency to postulate an end to cinema.  In thus examining the intricate set of logics at work within these figures of the cinema’s death, I shall also suggest how these same logics underpin—and may thereby also inform our reading of—various intermedia practices that in recent years have incorporated the cinematic image, displacing it from its traditional context.

An Invention without a Future

I have noted already that the positing of an end to cinema is in itself a far from novel concept, a point affirmed in several of the aforementioned arguments (that nevertheless concluded the cinema would  [italics] effectively end with the closure of the twentieth century).  In fact, more than any other art, the cinema has died repeatedly and with great regularity over the course of its relatively brief (just over one century) existence.  As Michael Witt has noted, “views of the cinema as in terminal decline have accompanied the evolution of cinema history, with commentators pointing to crises in the cinema as early as the 1910s.”[2]  Indeed, much scholarship on the invention of cinema and modern culture has emphasized the very uncertain technological and cultural status of the early cinema, whose very existence competed with many other techniques and forms of popular entertainment and leisure.  As Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz have written, “Cinema constituted only one element in an array of new modes of technology, representation, spectacle, distraction, consumerism, ephemerality, mobility, and entertainment—and at many points neither the most compelling nor the most promising one.”[3] Hence perhaps the oft-quoted remark—whether apocryphal or not—by one of the cinema’s inventors, Antoine Lumière: “le cinéma – c’est une invention sans avenir.”  Of course, even with stabilization of technological and sociological norms of cinema’s production and reception early in the twentieth century, and with the medium attaining an ever-more-dominant status in the realm of popular entertainment, an ongoing succession of film-historical traumas have nevertheless been construed—be it contemporarily or retrospectively—as marking an end to cinema.  The arrival of sound in late 1927, in bringing about a more rigid set of narrative and production codes, has frequently been taken as the end-point of silent film’s extraordinary formal and narrative explorations; such a premise, according to Witt, puts forth a nostalgic, idealized image of the silent period as one of “unsullied innovation and experimentation before language in its dual guise of the written script and of the filtering through of the aesthetic limitations ushered in by the introduction of sound recording, combined to produce the enduring codes of classical film narrative and its derivatives.”[4]  While this argument is developed at greatest length by Pierre Leprohon in his two-part study Histoire du cinéma muet: vie et mort du cinématographe (1895-1930)[5], Witt hastens to note that “this blanket concept of the smothering of silent cinema by the talkies obscures, in the French context at least, both the economic instability of the cinema industry in France across the 1910s, and the role of the onset of World War I in hastening the crisis.”[6]   Nevertheless, it has proved an enduring figure of the cinema’s end. In an interview with Le Monde in 1990, Jean-Luc Godard reiterated the notion: “Le cinéma, s’est arrêté dans les années 20 avec le muet.”[7]

Television Apocalypse

Perhaps the most durable and sustained ‘crisis’ of the cinema has been the threat of its demise at the hands of television, most frequently portrayed in terms of a prolonged, uneasy coexistence of two media within which television’s increasing hegemony as the[italics] late twentieth-century cultural form is destined to render cinema obsolete.  A range of phenomena during the past half-century have been cited in order to reinforce the hypothesis of a steady decline in cinema’s economic position, aesthetic value and cultural significance as brought about by television.  Sylvia Harvey, among many others, has pointed to the exponential increase in average television viewing time, in comparison to declining figures for cinema attendance since the pre-television heyday of the 1940s, as evidence of cinema’s demise as a powerful cultural force.[8] Susan Sontag, echoing the latter conclusion in her now-infamous piece “The Decay of Cinema,” has argued: “the reduction of cinema to assaultive images (faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention grabbing, has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.”[9]  The various axes and parameters of this debate, which Michael Witt has termed “the television mutation” are too complex to explore or critique in any detail here, though Witt has tidily encapsulated its basic terms thus:

Intersecting this debate at various points has been the advent of video as a technology of both distribution and production, the former furthering the crisis in the future of cinema’s institutionalized venue of reception (the darkened theater) already provoked by broadcast television, the latter threatening to completely usurp the techniques and aesthetics of the celluloid medium by way of the electronic moving image.  While the video camera’s use was initially restricted to television production and to various forms of artist’s video (from single-channel tapes to video sculpturesinstallations to guerilla television), the more widespread incorporation of video images into motion pictures in the 1980s, notably in the work of Wim Wenders, was again construed as a ‘crisis’ that would signal the end of cinema.  For example, Wenders’s 1989 film Notebook on Cities and Clothes—though ostensibly a documentary on Tokyo-based fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto—was conceived as a self-reflexive meditation on the future of cinema vis-à-vis the video techniques employed in its production.  At one point in the film, Wenders, in voice-over, states:

A hybrid cinematic work, employing both 35mm film and 8mm video, Notebook on Cities and Clothes may be regarded as one of the harbingers of the wave of more mainstream digital-videofilm productions—both documentary and fiction—that mark the current state of world cinema.  Dramatic improvements in digital video technologies throughout the 1990s—increased resolution, anamorphic “widescreen” effects and high-quality video-to-film transfer—seem to have all but eliminated the aesthetic ‘stigma’ of video as a production tool in mainstream cinema, as evidenced by the critical and commercial success of films such as Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (Palme d’or, Cannes 2000).  Hence the argument put forth in the context of the latest death-of-cinema debate, that the accelerating pace of digital-videofilm convergence will render all distinctions arbitrary—to the detriment (and thus the inevitable demise) of the celluloid medium.

Cinema’s Grim Reaper

Of course, various other “deaths” of cinema have been postulated throughout the course of cinema’s history, not necessarily as a direct function of the technological, sociological and aesthetic transformations I have discussed in the above chronology of “end-isms.”  In his article entitled “The Death(s) of Cinema According to Godard” from which I have already been quoting, Michael Witt has also noted—most notably in that director’s post-1967 work—a revolutionary [italics] figure of the death of cinema: the call for an end to “cinema as a reactionary cultural form and purveyor of sanitized bourgeois myths and clichés”[12]  by those mobilized around the events of May 68; while short-lived, this movement by Godard and other politicized filmmakers sought to liquidate commercial cinema and construct some form of critical alternative as theorized by Roger Boussinot in his leftist 1961 manifesto Le Cinéma est mort, vive le cinéma.[13]  Within the more recent films in Godard’s oeuvre, Witt has also identified -in addition to the above-mentioned figures of the cinema’s end- what might be regarded as an elaboration of the cinema’s ethical [italcs] ‘death’, to wit:

Witt’s analysis of Godard’s oeuvre appears all the more strikingly accurate given the various figures of the cinema’s death that are woven together in the director’s most recent feature film, Éloge de l’amour (2001), a cinematic diptych in which the first part is shot in black and white film (an elegy to a dying art), the second in heavily saturated colour video.  The first part concerns film director Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), who while casting his latest production encounters Elle (Cecile Camp), who he is certain that he has met before.  After some deliberation, he decides to cast her in the lead role, only to learn that she has died suddenly.  In the second part, a flashback to two years earlier, we learn that Edgar and the girl had in fact met when Edgar visited the house of an elderly couple -former Resistance members who survived the Nazi occupation and wish to sell their story to Hollywood.  Elle is the aged couple's granddaughter, dealing on behalf of her relatives in their attempts to make money from their suffering.  Like much of Godard’s recent work, Éloge de l’amour is forbiddingly dense with political-historical and film-historical commentary, invoking myriad cinematic references from Jean Vigo to Robert Bresson, as well as numerous witty and cynical remarks referencing the malignant hegemony of American entertainment culture -one scene features a couple of youngsters demanding that The Matrix be dubbed into Breton.

Of course, there is little denying that Godard’s work has been dissipating as a cultural force for some time. His films rarely see wider release beyond France or Switzerland; and they are often critically panned as pretentiously self-indulgent andor irrelevant.  Notwithstanding, I am inclined to agree with Witt’s suggestion that Godard’s repeated pronouncements of the cinema’s ‘death’ in his numerous writings and interviews (in addition to the thematic preoccupation with this question seen in his films), conflating various of the figures outlined above, have continued to influence popular discourse on film, in what Witt has characterized as “the infiltration of these ideas in watered-down form (often virtually unrecognizable) into journalistic discourses where they fit comfortably into the fin de siècle zeitgeist.”[15]

The Ruins of Cinema

What, then, of the “death of cinema” that moving-picture archivists have long been arguing is the most real and pressing crisis of all: the inherent instability of the celluloid medium which results in the irretrievable loss of countless films each passing year?  Few of the popular arguments in the aforementioned fin de siècle context account for this facet of cinema’s projected end, perhaps because these issues are largely contained within the technical spheres of film—archiving, restoration and other specialized disciplines—and the public and private institutions that sponsor their work, and outside the scope and interest of the commercial world, excepting the occasional fanfare that accompanies the re-release of restored and re-mastered prints of well-known classic films (Lawrence of Arabia, Gone With the Wind).  In the passage from Godfrey Cheshire’s essay quoted herein before, the author alludes to the museumification of classic films, which process of preservation would thereby impart to its object “an increasingly archaic air.”[16] However, for each film that is preserved, thousands disappear forever: only about 20% of films from the silent period are extant and according to Wheeler Winston Dixon, “nearly half [italcs] of all films made before 1950 have been irretrievably lost through the twin exigencies of neglect and nitrate decomposition.”[17]  In addition to this incalculable loss, innumerable prints have been wantonly destroyed by film studios and distributors over the course of the past century, a routine practice designed to prevent unauthorized second-run screenings and other copyright infringements.  Given as well the more recently-discovered phenomenon of cellulose acetate degradation (now referred to as “vinegar syndrome” by film archivists), which threatens nearly all film prints produced during the half-century hence and up to the present (including “preserved” prints of pre-1950 films), and the rapid fading (within a few short years) of colour film prints, the evidence suggesting that the physical survival of our entire motion picture patrimony is at serious risk would seem to impossible to dispute or deny. 

In a collection of aphorisms recently reissued under the timely title The Death of Cinema, motion picture archivist and educator Paolo Cherchi Usai has reflected on the relationship of film history to its disintegrating texts.[18]  According to Usai’s argument, film history as a discipline cannot adequately come to terms with its object’s ever-vanishing nature; film history is in fact constructed upon the status of film as a crumbling object.  The aims of film historiography—what Usai polemically regards as the chronicling and classification of the destruction of motion pictures—are in his view fundamentally at odds with the project of carrying forward the cultural memory embodied in the moving image.  Usai writes:

In a series of articles published throughout the 1990s, Dominique Païni, director of the Cinématheque française, has also considered the disintegration of film texts in relation to film history, film preservation and the practice of filmmaking.  In Païni’s view, we have in recent decades been witnessing the transformation of cinema’s “archival imaginary”—the rediscovery of and engagement with the films of the past by modern cineastes—into an imaginary of the “ruins” of cinema.[20]  Païni writes:

Païni notes that while formerly the notion of a “preserved” film was virtually synonymous with a film restored and re-shown in its entirety, the preservation and presentation of incomplete films—especially surviving fragments of early cinema from the 1910s—has become more commonplace over the past two decades.[22]  Moreover, Païni identifies within contemporary film practices a preoccupation with the trace, the fragment, the incomplete, and a renewed interest in recycled and found footage, that would seem to suggest a tendency to recast the history of film not as a successive series of complete works, but as a vast and heterogeneous visual anthropology of film fragments, an archaeology of “ruins.”

The practical stakes in our desire for film’s survival, given the drastically insufficient resources for film conservation and restoration, are addressed in a highly cynical addendum to Usai’s The Death of Cinema under the title “A Reader’s Report to the Publisher.”  For the unnamed author of this response to Usai’s text, there is little to even justify the enterprise of preserving films: given the billions of hours of moving images still being produced, the number of films that it will ever be possible to save is relatively infinitesimal.  The restoration of a few films is thus but a symbolic gesture that obscures both the real proportions of this loss and the highly problematic (and often hypocritical) agendas negotiated and pursued within the network of interests—commercial, administrative, cultural, etc.—that sponsor this work (the author notes such issues as the often-redundant restoration of “classic” films due to commercial demand andor potential, archivists’ reluctance to publicize their awareness of “vinegar syndrome” for fear of losing funding to their preservation projects, and the current blind faith espousal of the latest digital technologies touted as film’s possible saviour).  Concluding that even film conservation will reach its end-point when the inevitable obsolescence of 35mm film makes the enterprise no longer viable, the author, in a passage that seems to echo the arguments of Cheshire and other fin de siècle film critics, writes:

The Sense(s) of Ending

What are we to make, then, of the various cinematic “traumas” elaborated herein—this ongoing series of terminal crises, each predicated on a particular definition of cinema, be it aesthetic, technical, sociological, ideological, etc.?  Moreover, how might we understand the pervasive need to invoke andor redeploy these figures within the most recent fin de siècle pronouncements of the cinema’s death?  To begin with, we might note that all of these arguments have their basis in a rectilinear view of history, that is to say, a forward-moving succession of events and transformations that constitute the historical teleology of the cinema.  As Susan Sontag’s argument states: “Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.”[24]  And clearly, no passing of these crises, nor any refutation of their underlying principles, would seem to permanently falsify their fundamental postulate: that the cinema is destined to end.  We might put forth such counter-arguments as the remarkable stability of 35mm as the standard film gauge (with four sprocket holes per frame, going back as far as Edison’s Kinetoscope) and of cinema’s modes of production (the film industry) and reception (the darkened theater), the continuing coexistence of both cinema and television in the new millennium, the discovery that nitrate prints may not decompose nearly as quickly as previously believed when stored at correct temperatures, etc. etc.  For all of this, the end-of-cinema postulate continues to impose itself within contemporary cultural discourse.  This apparent paradox, in my view, carries a more-than-superficial connection to historical notions of apocalypse, which also, as the literary theorist Frank Kermode has noted, are rectilinear in structure and continually adjust their postulates in the interest of reality and control.[25]  It would thus be worthwhile to elaborate a few of Kermode’s remarks on apocalypse in more detail before I move on to a closer examination of the various teleological paradigms that underpin the most recent “death of cinema” debate. 

In his 1965 series of lectures, collected under the title The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Kermode has discussed the relationship between apocalyptic thought and fiction.  For Kermode, fiction originates in a basic need to relate experience to grand beginnings and ends; the notion of apocalypse, in which the “end” resumes the whole structure of the narrative, is fundamental to this pattern that we project onto historical time.  Apocalypse thus “ends, transforms and is concordant,” which is to say that its principles are dependent on a credible and consonant relationship between an “imaginatively recorded past and an imaginatively predicted future.”[26]  Kermode relates various historical and literary cases to this model: theological ends and fin de siècle myths—which postulates may be freely manipulated in order to achieve a desired consonance—are taken as examples of naïve apocalyptism, with attendant terrors andor decadence.  In modernity, apocalypse is no longer conceived strictly by reference to a common end, but more often to personal deaths, localized crises, the ending of an epoch, and so on; within these cases, the relations of beginning, middle and end are constantly altering.[27]  For Kermode, then, modern apocalyptic ‘ends’ cannot be imminent (such pronouncements would not be credible); rather, they are immanent, that is to say, ubiquitous and perpetually recurring. 

Given Kermode’s arguments, one can scarcely resist forwarding the view that the strength and pervasiveness of “death of cinema” postulations at the end of the twentieth century were, at least in part, a function of their concurrence with the naïve doomsday prophecies and the accompanying discourse of “terrors and decadence” that preceded the turn of the millennium.  The widespread anxiety over the possible failure of our global technological infrastructure to survive into the year 2000—crippled with the “Y2K bug”—seemed to portend a technological apocalypse of unforeseen proportions.  And for her part, Sontag stated the view that: “Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.”[28]  Yet this is only part of the story.  It is also necessary that we examine the different, overlapping teleological paradigms that have configured the “death of cinema” in concord with the “birth of cinema,” that is to say, how the various pronouncements of the cinema’s end have necessitated a re-writing of cinema’s beginnings.  These teleological models—transition, double-movement and negation—and the historical reconfigurations they have entailed, often bringing obscure and marginal histories to the fore, are the subject to which I will turn to in detail in part two.