Frampton is correct that the history of cinema, understood as the history of moving images, transcends a particular technology (an argument similar to the one made by D. N. Rodowick in The Virtual Life of Film). There’s no way of saying when this history began: some trace it as far back as the twenty-six-thousand-year-old “animated” cave paintings in Altimira, Spain, and others say cinema’s oldest ancestor is the camera obscura, which was known to the ancient Chinese and Greeks as a means of studying light and was used in fifteenth-century Europe as an instrument for tracing images in perspective. It nevertheless seems safe to argue that the modern cinema’s so-called pre- and posthistory extends at least from the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century to the digital revolution of the present.
The motion pictures of the Lumières and their contemporaries were the most spectacular invention of what is sometimes called the second industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the beginning of “modern times,” characterized by the advent of the electric light, the typewriter, the linotype, the transoceanic cable, the telephone, the phonograph, and so forth. The same period was the beginning of large-scale advertising and leisure activities that would ultimately constitute the modern consumer society and a new kind of mass culture. Whoever the masses were, the products and modes of production associated with them seemed American rather than European in origin, and the emergence of a critical discourse about them had something to do with the intertwined forces of industrialization and capitalism. These forces are still with us; in a sense, they have a need for cinema, which repeatedly adapts to new technical forms.
All this will seem cold comfort to those who love projected film on big screens. As I write, theatrical exhibition throughout the world is undergoing profound change, the ultimate consequences of which are unclear. The major Hollywood distributors have banded together and signed the Digital Cinema Initiatives, which, by the time this book appears, will make film prints unavailable for commercial theaters; projection will instead take the form of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP). Meanwhile, video notepads and computers are streaming motion pictures on demand, and people are watching movies on cell phones or the backs of airline seats.
The digital era, like modernity in general, is both catastrophe and progress. As a university teacher of film history who spent many years threading 16mm prints into projectors and who once thought that showing film on video in the classroom was a sin, I’ve become acutely aware that projected DVD and Blu-ray not only make instruction easier but in most cases give superior resolution and life to old movies. I also have the good fortune to live in Bloomington, Indiana, where the state-of-the-art Indiana University Cinema and its remarkable director-programmer, Jon Vickers, enable me to compare a wide range of motion picture technologies projected according to the highest standards (most commercial movie theaters project badly, no matter whether you are watching 35mm or digital). In that facility I’ve seen fifty-year-old home movies in 8mm, silent masterpieces with a live orchestra, rare 16mm prints, archival 35mm prints, wide-screen spectaculars, low-tech digital features by visiting directors Pedro Costa and Joe Swanberg, and 2k and 4k digital “restorations.” My experience convinces me that cinema today has a variety of technical formats offering rich artistic possibilities, none of which is inherently superior to the others. It also demonstrates that remediation isn’t evil. On a visit to Bloomington in 2012, Werner Herzog, who had several of his features converted to DCPs by Indiana University Cinema, announced with evident pleasure that the new process had made Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) look to him as if it had been made anew. It was no longer quite like a film of the 1970s; it lacked the grain and haptic markings of a celluloid print, but in some ways it was more vivid and exciting than the original.
Unfortunately, few of us have access to the kind of theater I’ve just described, and we’re entering a brave new world in which all movies, even when shot on film, will be viewed in the form of digital files. This change is more radical than any other in motion-picture history—quite different from the shift from silent pictures to sound, because in that case the photographic basis of the medium remained the same. Somebody once asked Mel Brooks what the most difficult aspect of making a film was, and Brooks said it was putting in all the little sprocket holes. The digital eliminates that problem; it’s a more convenient technology, and convenience trumps quality in the mass marketplace. The question then becomes whether celluloid (or Mylar) will survive at all; and if so, whether film projectors will have even as much future as vinyl record players and typewriters. I have no confident answer, but I recommend David Bordwell’s Pandora’s Digital Box (2012), available for digital download at www.davidbordwell.net, which offers a discussion of the changes we’re experiencing. As Bordwell points out, the DCP initiative consolidates the power of major distributors and threatens the survival of small theaters. It results in fired projectionists and junked projection equipment, and it will inevitably affect scholarship and formal analysis, making it nearly impossible, for example, to count frames on a film strip or choose an individual frame for reproduction.
For me, the biggest problem isn’t the loss of the film strip but the degree to which predigital cinema can be saved by remediation—which, since the 1950s, has been the chief way of making older films widely available. I can recall the period of Cinemascope and 3-D, when theaters were trying to compete with television; as a kid in those days, I saw many good films in the new formats, but I was even more fascinated by old movies from the 1930s and ‘40s that were becoming available at home on the late show. A good deal of my cinema education came from product that was dumped onto TV and interspersed with commercials. Today we have Turner Classic Movies on cable TV and DVD or Blu-ray offerings that greatly enlarge the common viewer’s knowledge of film history. But it remains unclear whether the business model for such things will survive in a world of streaming. As Dave Kehr noted in his New York Times video review column of December 2, 2012, “The major studios . . . have cut their full-scale releases of library titles to a minimum,” and “Any time a pre-2000 title makes it out of the vault is a cause for rejoicing.”
It is difficult to be positive about the changing mediascape without also being concerned about it. A wider range of movies is shown theatrically in the United States than ever before, but most independent and foreign films are seen in only a few big-city venues. Low-end digital technology has been used to superb effect by Pedro Costa, David Lynch, and Jean-Luc Godard, but the new cameras and digital editing equipment have also spawned hoards of lazily shot, slapped-together movies. Cinephilia is as alive as ever, but it no longer produces the kind of impassioned intellectual debate that went on in big-circulation newspapers and little magazines during the 1960s and ‘70s. Old films originally thought to have a short commercial lifespan are still reasonably valuable commodities; intelligent critical commentary on movies can be found in several places on the Internet; “orphan” movies and nontheatrical 16mm pictures are being digitally preserved; and, thanks to remediation, today’s students of cinema have much greater access to cinema. Nevertheless, more films have been lost than preserved, more films continue to be lost, and the potential death of the flexible film strip is leading to what Manohla Dargis has called “deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming a medium” (New York Times, September 9, 2012).
To my mind, just how transformative these shifts will turn out to be remains to be seen. Several critics and theorists, among them J. Hoberman, have argued that the death of traditional photography marks the end of André Bazin’s ideas about cinematic realism. The digital, this argument maintains,