The phenomena of moving images.
The illusion of progress, generated by the senses.
The year is 2020. Film is a little over a century old. The youngest of artforms, already it has been pronounced dead on countless occasions.
The Illusion, which once inspired awe and wonder in people, has since evoked skepticism and cynical thought. Hollywood, California has long been reduced to a cheap punchline to a joke about unrealized dreams. It’s best moments in the past few decades have been it’s shortest. It is, at best, “A place where ideas go to die,” and at worst, “A place where idealists go to die.”
Various filmmakers of all kinds have pronounced vainly: “Cinema is dead.” Steven Soderbergh has said he would “not care” if motion pictures ceased to be created. Every year, journalists find a new way to liken Cannes to a funeral. The obsession with death is, at all levels, dramatic and self-absorbed. But it has long been known that Hollywood is not Paradise, and it’s certainly not the end of film.
Despite their self-serving claims, film will outlive the auteurs. Powerful though they once were, they cannot take cinema with them, another servant in their tomb to accompany them in the afterlife.
Despite it’s best efforts, the film industry has not silenced those artists who never agreed to Hollywood’s terms. Films of value have always been produced elsewhere, whether in former Czechlslovakia, modern-day Iran, even those of the American underground who escaped commodification. The death of Hollywood, not of film itself, could be the greatest ever opportunity to re-evaluate the artform.
Don’t believe the hype. Death is only the beginning.