Film is Dead. What Does that Mean for Movies?

Is the era of movies ending? According to A. O. Scott writing in the Nov. 18th, 2011 NY Times, "movies, at the moment, feel especially fragile and perishable."

Even less nuanced is the opinion of Jean-Luc Godard who said in an interview published in The Guardian on July 12th, 2011: "Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur."

Are Godard and Scott simply making the same observation about the way that films are made today?

It's clear (with ARRI, Panavision and Aaton ceasing production of film cameras to focus exclusively on design and manufacture of digital cameras) that traditional filmmaking is threatened by technological and cultural changes.

Or are A. O. Scott and Jean-Luc Godard addressing a much more troubling question?

Are A. O. Scott and Jean-Luc Godard both saying that the whole notion of movies is under attack? Are Scott and Godard both suggesting that movies themselves are not what they used to be - and that the era of movies is ending?

Reading A. O. Scott's short piece in the NY Times he wraps up with a final sentence or two asserting that movies - perhaps not exactly like the movies of yesterday, but movies still - "will survive the current upheavals." But why?

By 2015 the amount of motion picture content uploaded to the web in just five minutes (every five minutes) will dwarf the volume all of the motion pictures ever produced prior to 2000.

Why does A. O. Scott think that movies (as we used to know them) will survive?

No comments:

Randy Finch's Film Blog:

Thoughts from a film producer about making and distributing films.