What is made now is content, and content is a different thing

The argument

A second argument concerns how the work is commissioned. Proponents argue that a medium is shaped by what its funders are trying to achieve, and that the aim has changed. Where a film once had to persuade people to leave their homes and buy a ticket, which meant being worth the journey, proponents argue that the work is now commissioned to fill a catalogue and retain a subscription, which is a different objective with different consequences. The mechanism proponents emphasise is the disappearance of the individual work. Retaining a subscriber rewards volume, familiarity and series that continue, and proponents argue that it penalises the self contained film that says what it has to say and ends, because such a film gives the viewer a natural moment to stop paying. Proponents argue the result is visible in what gets funded: recognisable properties, extensions of things that already exist, and work measured by completion rates rather than by whether it was worth seeing. Proponents argue that the loss is not of quality but of the conditions for ambition. A form needs works that fail interestingly, that are made against the grain and that find their audience slowly, and proponents argue that an economy of catalogue filling has no mechanism for any of these: nothing is permitted to be difficult, because difficulty is measured as abandonment. They accept that exceptions exist and argue that exceptions are what a dead form produces, surviving on the habits and the talent trained under the old arrangement. On this account cinema has ended as a going concern and continues as a residue.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that every era of the medium has been funded by someone pursuing something other than art, and that the studio system against which this account is implicitly measured was itself an industrial operation producing to formula. They add that the premises describe constraints on one part of the funding landscape while ignoring the rest: national funds, independent finance, festivals and co production arrangements all still back self contained and difficult work, and more of it is now accessible to more people than when a cinema's programme decided what anyone could see.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Every era of the medium has been funded by parties pursuing commercial aims, including the studio system that produced the work this account treats as the standard. [Rejecting P2] Self contained and difficult films continue to be commissioned by national funds, independent financiers and festivals, so the incentive described is not the whole landscape. [Rejecting P3] Works that find their audience slowly are now more reachable than when a cinema's programme determined what could be seen at all. [Rejecting C] The premises identify pressures on one part of film financing, which does not establish that the art form has ended.