The Future of Cinema

[fyodor]

quotes are from a Toronto Star article

Last night at Cannes they screened [ QUOTE ]
To Each His Own Cinema, a two-hour omnibus film commissioned by festival president Gilles Jacob that collects 32 meditations on film as an art form, each of them three minutes long. It will travel to other festivals and eventually end up on DVD.


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A few of the directors (notable among them the two Canadians - Cronenberg and Egoyan) take a pretty bleak view:


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Egoyan's film, Artaud Double Bill, takes place inside a Toronto arthouse screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc, the 1928 silent classic by Carl Theodor Dreyer that is one of Egoyan's favourites.

The stillness of the screening is disturbed by people who are busy texting each other on their cellphones.

Egoyan gloomily envisions a fast-approaching time when people will be watching movie classics on their cellphones and iPods, and forsake cinema as a tribal rite.


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Cronenberg's provocatively titled short, At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World at the Last Cinema in the World, takes an even bleaker view of moviegoing to come.

It stars Cronenberg as a dishevelled man in a future era of 24/7 news coverage of suicides, as he prepares to blow his brains out in the washroom of the last surviving moviehouse.

Such a scene may not be that far off, Cronenberg said. He believes traditional cinema is already dead.

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Roman Polanski vehemently disagreed and walked out due to the, in his opinion, "empty questions" being asked by the reporters.

Thoughts?