The Death of Cinema

It was the 31st of September 1983 when somewhere in the world cinema died. That is the Hollywood-centered narrative bookshop cinema died, according to Peter Greenaway, who in an interview with Andreas Kilb in 1989 stated, “I believe that the end has already arrived. Cinema is dying, in a social as well as in a technical sense. All the power, imagination, and scientific interest of the epoch has turned away from cinema." So there you have, it’s dead.

But how can something so alive be dead? How can something so engrained into our culture, something that one cannot go a day without reference to, be dead? How can a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry be dead? It can’t. And it takes a self-assured and ignorant sense of being to claim something so alive and relevant to be anything but.

Perhaps it is the state of being, or was. If cinema died twenty years ago, when I was two years old, what have I been doing with my life? Cinema is not a material function, its not like a warming pan that aside from being dangerous was rendered obsolete with something called heating. If anything, cinema is more alive than ever. What does it mean to be alive? Continuing in existence. A quick look around practically anywhere shows you that cinema is only growing, expanding, reaching into the far corners of the world and infecting everybody in its reach. If anything cinema is threatening to kill us.

In some ways it already has. We emulate and worship it, and demand to continue to do so. We expect to see certain things and are disappointed when we don't. Cinema has a firm and unloosening grasp on our culture. I would say it knows this but that seems impossible. But we know it and therefore cinema knows it. And if cinema is conscious, it is only conscious of the fact that it is us. So if it were dead, we would be dead. So maybe we are.

But step back for a second. We create cinema. We invented it, or at least discovered it. We brought it into this world and we can take it out. Cinema is not a self-perpetuating organic machine that self-replicates to endless degrees. The fact that it does indeed replicate is product of our intentions. We perpetuate its existence, its familiarity, its uniqueness, its life. We are the sole responsibility for its actions. It cannot act without us. And if it does act with apparent opposition to our desires then its because we unknowingly told it to.

At this point, cinema is something that keeps us alive. Film practically flows through the veins of theoretical ponderings and historical writings and popular culture. At this point we cannot avoid it. Something has been created that may never be destroyed. At this point it is too late to for it to die. The only contention, ending on a drearily apocalyptic note, is that we have the power to kill it.