the future of the big screen
The New Yorker on the rise and fall of movie theatres:
In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display—at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are “platform agnostic”—that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small. Most kids don’t have bellies, and they can pretzel their limbs into almost any shape they want, so they can get comfortable with a handheld device; they can also take it onto a school bus, down the street, into bed, cuddling it under the covers after lights-out.
The seven major studios, with their many divisions, produce or pick up for distribution most of the American “content” that is sent all over the world. Should they continue to shoot on film or switch to digital? Digital technology opens enormous possibilities for filmmakers, and even for exhibitors, but it also offers a radical break with the many ways of watching movies that have given us pleasure in the past. Every kind of screen comes with its own aesthetic, and imposes its own social experience on moviegoers. We’ve all watched hundreds of movies on old TVs, and taken endless pleasure from doing so, but to watch “Citizen Kane” on TV for the first time is a half-fulfilled promise; to see it on a big screen is a revelation. If watching movies at home becomes not just an auxiliary to theatregoing but a replacement of it, a visual art form will decline, and become something else. Kids who get hooked on watching movies on a portable handheld device will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don’t yet know it—even if they never know it. And their consumer choices could affect the rest of us, just as they have in the music business. If the future of movies as an art form is at stake, we are all in this together.
Read the rest here.
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