The End of Cinema?: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion (review)

Abstract

THE END OF CINEMA?: A MEDIUM IN CRISIS IN THE DIGITAL AGE By Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion Translated by Timothy Barnard New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 240pp.REVIEWED BY JOHN W. LOCKEMost of the members of the film studies community have thought about and been concerned about film's change to digital. What will happen to film/ cinema? We have had the conversations, but few of us have made it a priority as we allocate our thinking and research time.The End of Cinema? is an important record of the thinking of two scholars about the cinema/digital/film nexus of issues. Particularly if you have worried about these issues and want to understand their history as well as to become current, this book is an excellent introduction. For example, it contains a clear discussion of the positions of Raymond Bellour and Jacques Aumont who hold views that each of us has heard expressed. For Gaudreault and Marion they represent "classical cinephiles" for whom "movie-theatre projection ... defines cinema" (20). Cinema only exists when a film is being projected in a dark movie theatre. Each has a book supporting their position, but the first chapter of The End of Cinema? briefly states the Bellour and Aumont positions and outlines comments by Dudley Andrew, James Lastra and Tom Gunning. It is a thorough review of the literature.Gaudreault and Marion have selected a dramatic metaphor, "the death of cinema," to organize many of their points. The transition to sound is the cause of "the death of silent cinema" which for them is the fourth death of cinema. This may come as a surprise for many readers who perhaps have viewed silent cinema as a smoothly developing history. What were the three earlier deaths? It is clear when reading this book that the early history of film is a particular area of research for the authors. I will not attempt to summarize their decades of work in a few sentences, but a value for a reader finding this book about digital cinema is that they may be led to read their work on early cinema. The idea that cinema had three deaths before the coming of sound is intriguing. Their work gives proper importance to changes such as the transition to renting films rather than selling them and to another death in the 1910s, which actually represents the birth of cinema for the authors.Although earlier periods of cinema are well discussed, the focus of the book "is the passage to digital" (50). The authors consider whether this is a revolution, a rupture, a mutation, a turn, or an upheaval and think their way through these descriptions. Their conclusion is the reasonable one of explaining distinctions, but deciding to use a range of terms (revolution, rupture, passage, turn, mutation) rather than being distracted by arguing for a single term. If their discussion had taken place a decade earlier, it would have been about a transition in progress, moving towards a start to finish fully digital cinema, but they are now able to title Chapter Two "Digitalizing Cinema from Top to Bottom." Their book comes at the right time.A particularly useful contribution of this book is to quickly move the reader deeper into the discussions about digital and cinema. For example, they deal with questions such as whether the application to film of Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of indexical becomes moot with digital images. Or, if the normalization outside a movie theatre of the ability to pause, or to quickly review an earlier image, represents a new standard way to view a film. There are also issues such as whether it could be that film projections and digital projections cannot be told apart versus the position that digital images are characterized by a "clinical coldness." The authors discuss the publications on these questions, allowing the reader to take an excursion into these topics or move ahead with the book's development. …