Is Cinema Mortal?

The fact that one can reasonably ask oneself such a question today, and that it requires some thinking through to come to an optimistic answer, should be enough to justify astonishment and musing. While deliberately sensational, Raymond Cartier’s article published recently in Match on the current situation in Hollywood is fundamentally correct; the statistics he provides in support of his thesis are perfectly convincing.1 Let us recall that, roughly speaking, Hollywood has lost some 50 percent of its domestic public over the last ten years. This massive loss (attributable especially, but not exclusively, to TV) seems, however, more or less to have stabilized. Hence we can imagine a corresponding decline in production: either 150 or 200 films per year, or a proportional reduction of the budget of each film.

But we know perfectly well that in a capitalist economy, things do not operate so simply. We have to be realistic and imagine that one fine day, the large companies will all find themselves in the red, so that from then on cinema, having ceased to be a profitable industry, will realize that the capital on which everything runs will not wait around to be further diminished, but will migrate to be invested elsewhere. In other words, having passed beneath a certain economic threshold, production will cease to adjust itself to consumption and will simply drop out of the game, just as the French agricultural sector would immediately lose interest in raising beets if the government did not artificially keep the price of French alcohol above the going international rate.

If we envision the continuation of cheap alternative production by new independent studios benefiting from the pullback of big corporate money, the situation does not necessarily get any brighter. This kind of production already exists right in the heart of Hollywood, and has for some time. In sheer number, cheap alternative films represent more than half the annual output; and they are not monopolized by second-tier production companies, for even the large studios have their Z productions. However, in this latter instance, save for a few isolated cases of unintentional poetry – which can be the paradoxical product of extreme standardization – these films suffer from total intellectual and aesthetic indigence.

Yet this hypothesis authorizes what amounts to an optimistic misgiving. In a sense, with cinema restricted to this third zone of production, it might return to its popular origins, to the quasi anonymity at work at the outset of the movies. In no longer aspiring to Art with a capital A, perhaps film will rediscover its real genius, not what the “exclusive,” first-run theaters advertise. Personally, I can’t quite believe this will ever happen, since the conditions would be the same only in appearance. Any turning back to reduced pretentions would be achieved without the innocence of those early years, and so would amount not to a natural evolution but to an involution, a decline. Thus, either cinema would cease physically to exist, or it would subsist in larval forms, at the level of comic strips in the big American newspapers – falling short of Art.

The fact is that cinema is not an Art plus an industry, it is an Industrial Art. And so we should not imagine for it the types of survival mechanisms the theater enjoys. In France theater still exists in spite of cinema thanks, on the one hand, to the devotion and sheer willpower of so many people of the theater, people ready for any sacrifice and full of the ingenuity needed to carry on the ritual of stagecraft, and thanks, on the other hand, to subventions from the state, which understands, in spite of its changing regimes and ministers, that a nation without theater would be like a dead country. In this sense the theater cannot die, for it will always be reborn everywhere, in children’s games, at country festivals, out of the irrepressible need of certain young men and women to “play” for their assembled fellows.

But cinema does not enjoy this immunity. It was born not of man but of technology; it depends completely on the latter and on its evolution.

Perhaps it is only in some mental game, some optical illusion of history, fleeting like a shadow traced by the sun, that we have been able to believe in the existence of cinema for fifty years. Perhaps “the cinema” was in fact nothing but a stage in the vast evolution of the means of mechanical reproduction that had their origin in the nineteenth century with photography and the phonograph, and of which television is the most recent form. Perhaps it is only by way of one cluster of serendipitous technical, economic, and sociological convergences that the thing we call cinema has had the time to evolve toward indubitably aesthetic forms. Lumière, in short, had it right when he refused to sell his camera to Méliès on the pretext that it was merely a technological curiosity, at best useful for medical doctors.

It was a second birth that made cinema into the spectacle it has become today. However, you can readily imagine that the evolution of this art, proceeding through misunderstanding, might be brutally interrupted by the appearance of a more satisfying technology, such as television. This would be satisfying not, certainly, from an artistic point of view – which does not belong here – but in its capacity as an automatic means for the reproduction of reality. Indeed, it takes puerile idealism to believe that the artistic quality of its spectacle can defend cinema against the advantages of television, whose image brings about, for modern mankind, the miracle of ubiquity.

Hollywood is ready to play double or nothing with 3D, but then tomorrow television will come up with depth and color and thus everything will be called into question again.

So? So perhaps in twenty years the “young critics” of some new form of spectacle that we cannot even imagine, and which can’t be guaranteed to be “an art,” will be reading our film criticism from 1953 with a condescending smirk. Our views today could seem to them more naïve than the aesthetic sectarianism we find in our predecessors from the 1930s, who were properly outraged at the death throes of an art of the pure image that had finally reached maturity.

In the meantime and while waiting, let’s just play dodgeball; I mean, let’s go to the cinema and treat it as an art.

• 1Raymond Cartier (1904–1975) was an acclaimed political writer whose books and essays on anticolonialism and World War II landed him the post as New York correspondent for Paris-Match. On July 18, 1953, he authored the cover story of Paris-Match whose title, “Le Cinéma va-t-il disparaitre?” (The cinema, is it going to disappear?), is scripted on a Doric column cradled by Marilyn Monroe.