Towards a Decentralized Cinema

Allow me to get high-minded for a moment…

I should say at the top here that this is largely a collection of thoughts that I’m working through in more-or-less real time, and so they may still be fairly unformed. However, after my grumblings about box office a couple of weeks ago and a recent email from my department head spitballing whether we should at some point consider moving our film program more in the direction of live sports and unscripted…content (shudder), I’ve been thinking a lot about not only the state of cinema and its future, especially as both seem to be in a period of great flux (which is neither new nor unique for any point within its 130-odd-year history), but also about the ways in which I think it should move forward in order to maintain its cultural relevance and artistic vitality.

Maybe the first thing that we should do is define what cinema even is. This is quite the heated topic of late, in part because you have filmmakers who have a vested interest in its continuation as an art form coming into the crosshairs of entitled, sore-winning nerds who want every piece of dreck they watch to be considered high art. Which points to the first major problem, which is considering “cinema” a qualitative term in and of itself. For my purposes, let’s dispense immediately with notions of what is “good” or “bad” because 1) it’s not that interesting to me since 2) that’s all subjective anyway¹ and 3) it doesn’t really matter. Cinema simply means motion (quite literally, as it comes from the Greek root kinema, which means movement). Cinematography is by definition the recording of motion; kinema = movement, graphia = to write.

Cinema is, quite simply, the recording and exhibition of moving images.

For about 50 years, that meant movies exclusively. But even “movie” has meant different things since the inception of the form. The earliest films were 30-second shorts depicting everyday occurrences, or brief depictions of fictional scenes. They were a novelty, pure spectacle. In America they were initially viewed in Kinetoscopes, an individual viewing mechanism wherein you dropped a coin into a slot and peered through an eyepiece to view the reel of film contained and projected within.

In Europe, the Lumière Brothers developed a camera that could also be converted into a projector and thus could display the films it recorded on a large screen for an audience. In either case, cinema was nothing more than a single short reel of film depicting about 15 seconds of motion from a single fixed perspective.

Early film artists pushed at the limits of the technology and created the practice of film editing, which led to the ability to assemble images in a way that led to movies of longer duration and greater narrative, emotional, and psychological complexity and sophistication. This eventually “culminated” in the feature-length film, which became the de facto form of cinematic delivery because producers and exhibitors realized that you could bring in then-unheard of sums of money for them.

All of which is to say that the feature-length film, viewed in a movie theater, was not a platonic ideal that we were working towards from the beginning. It was a model that allowed for a certain degree of narrative investment and expressive potential, but more importantly is was a model for financial success on the part of the people who were investing in their creation and exhibition. Movies had to break free from the Kinetoscope booths as they got longer and more complex, but exhibitors were more than happy to let them do that because it meant more return on less investment. The reason we see movies in theaters is not because that was the best way to experience them - it’s because exhibitors could sell more tickets against the price of a single projector versus shelling out for a parlor full of machines that could only accommodate one paying customer at a time.

We have always had numerous ways of viewing images - static or moving - in a variety of settings, including our own homes - magic lanterns, zoopraxiscopes, zoetropes, etc. Movies in a theater represented the most advanced form of this technology, and as such could provide the most immersive and transporting experience. And for half a century or so they were the only way to experience photographic images that moved in real time as we move through life itself. TV is the first time that dominion was challenged, and it’s been chipped away ever since by video, DVD, streaming, internet, you name it.

So the question constantly comes up: What is cinema?

Movies are cinema. TV is cinema. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, all cinema if we’re talking about it in the sense of its literal definition - moving images.

Does that mean that all of these venues provide the same value or richness of experience? God no. Is that beside the point? That gets harder and harder to say in a world where all of these things get jumbled by our corporate overlords into the ever-indiscriminate well of “content.”

The reason this discussion is so fascinating to me though is that it feels unique amongst all art forms. Audiophiles will claim vinyl as the optimal medium for music, but it’s readily accepted that music is experienced via a large variety of delivery services and media. There’s also little argument over whether music means a song, an album, a symphony, an opera. It’s all understood to be music. But cinephiles will often say that if you’re not watching a film in a theater, then you’re not really watching it. Some of them will even say it about watching anything other than a celluloid print. Which, as a self-professed cinephile who saw most of his favorite movies on either VHS or standard-def DVD, is insanity. But what’s more troubling about this is that if this is the case, then that means the only thing that can be defined as cinema is the mass release studio feature film.

Why do we limit cinema so specifically to its narrative format and mode of exhibition?

I agree that a movie theater is the ideal place to view a film. But it’s not the only way. And as an experience, has it been degraded enough by corporate owners who care more about cutting costs than upkeep, by increasingly obnoxious and distracting audiences, or by an influx of advertisements that push the whole experience to 5 hours minimum once you factor in travel and parking, that it may not be in fact be the optimal way to view cinema any longer? I don’t know², but possibly.

Part of the sticking point here is that film is one of the few art forms that has, for most of its existence at least, been defined by the means with which it was recorded and displayed. Music is a real-world entity that can be experienced live or via recording, in a variety of venues - an opera house, a concert hall, an arena, a bar, a subway station - and through a multitude of delivery systems - record, tape, CD, streaming, radio. Visual artists work in the creation of still images, and do so with any number of materials - paints (acrylics, oils, watercolors), mosaic, collage - arranged on any number of media - canvas, wood, walls, cardboard. But film, for the first hundred years, had always been shot on and projected from literal film.

So perhaps part of the issue is that our definition of cinema is too dependent on the technology used to produce it rather than on what it is on a fundamental level. Which is not to say that I am anti-celluloid - this is all, again, irrespective of questions of quality. I still believe that the photochemical process produces the best quality images (though how much of that is because it’s a “look” that I grew up with?).

I’m also by no means anti-theaters - I strongly believe, in fact, that moving forward does not and should not mean leaving behind everything that came before. But I am realistic enough to believe that the future of cinema - not as an industry so much as a living, breathing, and vital art form - is not in theaters.

Again, make no mistake - I want movie theaters to continue in perpetuity, and will continue to support them for as long as they do³. I have introduced my son to movie theaters and will continue to take him and his brother until they are too embarrassed to be seen in public with me. I love feature films, and hope that they continue as a narrative format…as long as they remain interesting and engaging. I’m less interested, however, in movies as corporate product or brand strategy. Which is more and more what we’re getting.

I believe that the future of cinema is in our expansion of its meaning and, as is usually the case, somewhat within the destruction or at least reconsideration of what we have considered it to be up until now.

Cinema is not inherently a feature-length film.

Cinema is not narrative. It can be, and mostly has been, but it can also be so much more.

Cinema is not Hollywood. Not exclusively, at least. It is also not exclusively theatrically-released, or major streamer-released, films.

It is moving images, recorded and then played back for a viewer. These images can be used to communicate, they can be used to entertain, they can be used to enlighten. Sometimes all of the above. There’s so much that this can entail, and even with the wide and overlooked history of experimental filmmaking and video art, or even with the (in this country) largely-discounted international cinemas, we have really only scraped its surface. Not only in terms of material and form, but it in terms of how and where it is produced and exhibited. Hollywood has been the centralized hub of narrative feature filmmaking in this country, but it doesn’t have to be. We may have to recalibrate some expectations, and we may have to change or accept some different ideas of success, but we can foster a notion of regional filmmaking of all kinds - independent, experimental, narrative. A cinema that is not about careerist ambitions, or even about making a career of it all all, but about providing a form of expression and giving a fuller and richer life to the people making and watching it, while also developing a fuller and richer community of like-minded artists and collaborators.

None of whom have any interest in making it in the industry so much as they have an interest in making interesting films.

Maybe this is utopian. It admittedly does not contend with the need for artists to make a living, either through their work or through a job that also leaves them with time and energy to create art. But I believe more and more with each passing day that “making it big” cannot, and perhaps should not, be the ultimate aim of the serious cinema practitioner. Partly because I see more and more the ways in which the industry has swallowed its most interesting artists.

Regional filmmaking means less resources, but perhaps it’s time we embraced those limitations as a virtue; it often results in more interesting work anyway. Part of what has corroded cinema is that it is uniquely positioned as an industry, and what may save it as an art form is giving the industrial model to the careerists and filling the void with a model of cinema that thinks outside of the bounds of professional ambition and considers the pure act of creation to be an end unto itself. The professionals can still have their content and their industrials and their promotional videos. But call all of that what it is - advertising. Advertising uses cinema as it has used literature and art and photography, but it is not those things in and of itself. It’s long been a way to make a living and that’s fine but when it’s an end unto itself it’s not a way forward. It also devalues and homogenizes visual language; all the more reasons to reject it and work outside of its bounds. The content creators can still practice their own form of advertising.

None of this is going away any time soon. But there has to be something beyond all of it that includes narrative shorts and features made on a truly independent level so that they’re allowed to be weird, unique, and rough-hewn while also accommodating anything and everything else that could conceivably be classified as cinematic expression.

Part of why I’m so drawn to the absurdists is that they were not only rebelling against a form of expression that no longer worked, but against a world that no longer worked. It feels to me as if we’ve gotten back to that point, and as such we need to sweep everything off the table and try again from scratch. We don’t need disruption in the commodified tech meaning of the word, but we do need reinvention. Perhaps a full-scale reinvention from top to bottom.

I’m not saying anything new. I also know that so much of this would necessitate funding and support for the arts from both national and local governments. I get all of that. But as we’ve learned in the last decade and change, the local level is not only our best bet of effective change but maybe our only hope of doing so in a real way. We have regional theater, and local music and art scenes, that don’t inherently see themselves as means to an end. Why not the same with cinema? Because as studios become more corporatized and conglomerated, and as the debate rages over which buzzword to capitalize on next, the future of cinema for anyone who values it as an art form has to be found elsewhere.

1. Which means one should not take my mean and perhaps somewhat ungenerous earlier dig too much to heart.

2. And as a parent of two small children who rarely gets to go out and thus watches what little he can at home via streaming or physical media, I may not be the one who should say.

3. The good ones, at least.