The theatre was the form, and the audience has left it

The argument

The case that cinema is dead turns on what the word named. Proponents argue that cinema was never simply moving pictures; it was a specific arrangement in which strangers sat together in the dark, in front of an image larger than themselves, unable to pause, skip, check a phone or leave without cost. Proponents argue that this arrangement was not incidental to the art but constitutive of it: the length of a shot, the use of silence, the slow build and the withheld reveal all assume an audience that cannot escape. The mechanism proponents emphasise is that the form shaped the work. Directors made films for conditions they could count on, and proponents argue that when those conditions go, the work changes to suit what replaced them. A film made in the expectation of being watched in instalments, on a small screen, against the competition of a phone, is built differently: it explains more, waits less, front loads incident and avoids anything a distracted viewer might miss. Proponents argue that what is being made now is therefore a different thing wearing the old name. Proponents accept that films continue to be produced and watched in large numbers, and argue that this is what makes the death easy to overlook. Their claim is not that the industry has stopped but that the art form has ended, in the way that other forms have ended while their outputs continued in altered shape. On this account the theatrical experience survives as a minority taste for particular kinds of spectacle, the communal audience that gave the medium its grammar has dispersed, and what remains is video distributed to households. Proponents conclude that cinema, properly understood, is dead.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument defines cinema by one distribution arrangement and then notes that the arrangement has changed, which proves nothing about the art. Theatrical exhibition was itself a commercial accident the medium acquired rather than its essence, and films have been watched at home for generations without anyone previously declaring the form extinct. They add that the stylistic claim is an assertion about contemporary work that cuts both ways, since the same period has produced slow, long and demanding films in quantity, many of them funded by the very services the argument blames.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Defining cinema as one exhibition arrangement builds the conclusion into the definition, since any change of venue then counts as death. [Rejecting P2] Shot length, silence and withheld revelation are used in work made for domestic viewing as well, so the techniques do not depend on the arrangement. [Rejecting P3] The same period has produced slow, long and demanding films in quantity, often funded by domestic distributors, so the stylistic generalisation does not hold. [Rejecting C] At most the premises show that theatrical exhibition has declined, which is a change in how films reach audiences rather than the end of the art.