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.


[/ QUOTE ]

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


[ QUOTE ]
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.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
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?

[Butso]

yeah but in the cinema you don't have "tinny sound" or a "small screen"

[fyodor]

For sure I would rather watch movies on a big screen, but like Ken Loach says with his contribution, you can show up at a cineplex and there are 12 movies playing that I have no interest in seeing.

[ QUOTE ]
British helmer Ken Loach, last year's Palme winner for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, had an even darker view than the two Canadians.

His short film, sarcastically titled Happy Ending, is a case of biting the hand that feeds you. It shows a father and son lining up to see a movie together and deciding they don't like anything that's on offer. They elect to go and see a soccer game instead.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Blarg]

I see an incredible future for movies happening in the same way that the web gave communication and authorship to everyone on it, wresting it away from traditional publishers. I just may not be around to see it, but I'm hoping.

You and I can pick up a pen or type, but right now, animating things takes huge teams of people and enormous computing power compared to what the average joe has got. In the future, someone will find a way to map out the way muscles move under the skin on every type of bone structure and make that kind of program available in an animation package affordable by anyone. When that happens, you'll be able to make movies from your living room with whatever cast you can imagine, in a huge number of prepackaged, customizable settings with fractally-generated backgrounds. You'll be able to place lights where you want, and put the camera wherever you see fit, moving it how you like. You'll edit it and put in the sound. When we get to that stage, the visual orientation and literacy of our society will take another huge leap forward. The opportunities for and abundance of visual storytelling will be incredible, and we'll see all kinds of stories told that we'd never before have seen by authors who we'll have the great luck to see finally able to express their visions. It'll be heaven on earth movie-wise. It might put the studios in the position of supplying voice talent and movie-making computer tools and routines as much as making movies.

[Triumph36]

If anything, Ken Loach's film seems like a more apt comment.

This claptrap about movies being outright replaced - wasn't there the same uproar when the VCR came out? Did people stop going to concerts when they can hear them recorded on mp3?

[kerowo]

How long until there is a majority of movie-goers who have a home TV that is 4 or more feet across with digital sound and a big fat Internet pipe into it? When this happens and you can rent first run movies from Amazon or Google or Apple for less than the 15-20 bucks going to the movies will cost by then you will see how movie theaters re-create themselves because they will not be able to compete.

How much of "Cinema" revolves around being in a room with other people? My background is in theater where the performance changes with every audience and in a very real way the audience is an active participant in the event. Movies don't change depending on the audience so if the experience of seeng it with an audience becomes too much of a pain people will start watching at home.

[dlk9s]

3-D holograms, obviously.

[thecincykiddo]

nobody's mentioned how much things have changed since Cronenberg even started making films. Without knowing a lot about him (and knowing nothing about Egoyan) one thing seems clear enough to me: Films since the '70s have seriously declined in average shot time, to about (i think, don't quote me) an average of four second shots in a standard Hollywood film. It used to be (again, roughly speaking) about 22 seconds per shot.

Cronenberg makes longer shot films for the most part, which in a way makes him kind of old school. When (and I don't have time to check the link out just now) he's talking about traditional audiences, he's not just talking about theatre-goers; he's talking about attention span.

hell, it's pretty conceivable that someone downloading a film onto an iPod or a cell won't even have the attention span for that. Mass digital culture is a culture not really about attention, though; and, that's the thing -- it's about ownership and novelty and convenience.

I realize that this has been called the MTV effect, and that it's only in retrospect that we really link the emergence of fast-paced videos trying to keep up with a rock beat to the dawn of the digital film age, but it seems to me that the traditional movie-giong audience had already left a long time ago, at least in terms of numbers.

That will never change the fact that many people still love film and that digital has great, great limitations. (And that most of the people utilizing the technology have no sense of film history and will be limited further by their inability to really add to the film conversation.)

As for Cronenberg's short, I think it was kinda already made. You may have heard of it: Network.

Different, but same.

The thing is that neither of these fimmakers is in a position to really reach the audience that may "most need" to hear this message.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
How long until there is a majority of movie-goers who have a home TV that is 4 or more feet across with digital sound and a big fat Internet pipe into it? When this happens and you can rent first run movies from Amazon or Google or Apple for less than the 15-20 bucks going to the movies will cost by then you will see how movie theaters re-create themselves because they will not be able to compete.

How much of "Cinema" revolves around being in a room with other people? My background is in theater where the performance changes with every audience and in a very real way the audience is an active participant in the event. Movies don't change depending on the audience so if the experience of seeng it with an audience becomes too much of a pain people will start watching at home.

[/ QUOTE ]

Movies do indeed lose or gain a lot by virtue of an audience. Seeing a horror movie in the theater is much more fun than at home, and a comedy too. Dramas, not so much. Action thrillers can bring out whoops and howls and gasps too that add to the experience.

[JuntMonkey]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
How long until there is a majority of movie-goers who have a home TV that is 4 or more feet across with digital sound and a big fat Internet pipe into it? When this happens and you can rent first run movies from Amazon or Google or Apple for less than the 15-20 bucks going to the movies will cost by then you will see how movie theaters re-create themselves because they will not be able to compete.

How much of "Cinema" revolves around being in a room with other people? My background is in theater where the performance changes with every audience and in a very real way the audience is an active participant in the event. Movies don't change depending on the audience so if the experience of seeng it with an audience becomes too much of a pain people will start watching at home.

[/ QUOTE ]

Movies do indeed lose or gain a lot by virtue of an audience. Seeing a horror movie in the theater is much more fun than at home, and a comedy too. Dramas, not so much. Action thrillers can bring out whoops and howls and gasps too that add to the experience.

[/ QUOTE ]

Seeing Legend of Drunken Master in the theater was incredible, and for Rocky Balboa I almost died.