The Deaths of Cinema

Looked at one way, the history of cinema is a series of death knells. While the rhetoric of crisis is especially acute today, with the very existence of movie theaters imperiled by the dominance of streaming services, predictions of cinema’s demise are as old as the medium itself — one of its inventors is said to have called it “an invention without a future” and its evolution is marked by moments of technological and cultural change that were perceived or experienced as existential threats.

This course traces the arc of cinema through its many supposed deaths: the industrialization of movies, the arrival of sound, the threat of television and the home theater, the compensatory innovations of color and widescreen and CGI, the rise of media conglomeration, the invention of digital technology, the migration of the moving image into ever more settings and contexts (galleries, portable devices, the virtual realm), and so on. We will explore the circumstances that led to these inflection points and the ways in which each threshold period of change reshaped the landscape and language of cinema. We will also consider the periodic death throes (and various afterlives) of film criticism, film theory, and cinephilia.