I have been given a number of reasons recently to think about the year 1999. Also the death of film.
First there was the obvious. I finally finished reading Brian Raftery’s delightfully frustrating Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. The book recounts the slew of films that released in that year. From low-budget indie darlings to larger budget studio releases that still felt a little bit indie, Raftery argues 1999 was simultaneously a pinnacle year in cinematic art and the end of an era.
(Well… no he doesn’t argue that, but more on that elsewhere.)
As soon as I slid that book back on the shelf, my friend Matt Goldberg reminded me (in his excellent Substack newsletter) that A.O. Scott, famed film critic of the New York Times, was leaving that gig. I knew this. I had filed away Scott’s writeup on his time watching movies for the Gray Lady. Then I promptly forgot to read it.
When I did, I noticed Scott’s citation of the fall of 1999, “a few months before [he] was hired.”
The Death of Film
He proceeded to cite fellow critic Godfrey Cheshire who penned an essay that fall, almost 24 years ago: “The Death of Film, the Decay of Cinema.” He went on to cite quite a number of other essays, going all the way back to a German critic from 1935. Each example claimed the end of cinema, or something to that effect.
Scott’s ultimate point was that it was ever thus, and that we should probably not be so alarmed about the supposed death of film.
"The state of the movies is very bad. But the movies themselves — enough of them, as always — are pretty good. It's been a pleasure to see them in your company." – A.O. Scott
It was our pleasure Mr. Scott.
While all of the above was jockeying for my brain space, I have been intermittently re-listening to the albums of one of my favorite bands, Bastille. One song of theirs has been lodged in my head. While it has absolutely nothing to do with the decline of an art form or the tectonic shifts of an industry, it seemed apropos of a nostalgic look back from the remove of a quarter-century.
Things we lost to the flames
“Things We Lost in the Fire” by Bastille
Things we’ll never see again…
We sat and made a list
Of all the things that we had
Down the backs of table tops
Ticket stubs and your diaries
I read them all one day
When loneliness came and you were away
Oh, they told me nothing new
But I love to read the words you use…
The future’s in our hands and we will
Never be the same again…
That is a long and meandering way of getting to my question:
What did we actually lose in the fires of the past twenty-four years? Certainly there have been upheavals, big and small, in the world of film. That goes for the art of cinema as much (arguably more so) for the business of movies.
Getting Specific
I’m not sure 1999 is the date we should peg this decline to. I’m not even sure it is a decline. For people of a certain age, however, the way we enjoyed movies in the 1990s was markedly different. For people like me, who possess a certain fondness for the experience of cinema, that change does sometimes feel like a loss.
Nostalgia, for its own sake, is not interesting to me. Nevertheless, the question has bugged me for days on end.
The monoculture, like Pangea before it, broke apart. We started going to movie theaters less often. We stopped bringing home discs from the video rental store. We started streaming; then we started bingeing. We stopped talking about what we’d just seen, or at least we stopped talking to the people next to us.
There so often wasn’t anyone next to us when the credits began to roll.
Amidst all of that, what exactly was lost? Did the movies themselves change in the process? Was it just us, as an audience, that changed?
I’m going to deconstruct all of this over the coming weeks. I think there are a number of avenues worth exploring. On net, maybe what we’ve gained cancels out whatever was cast aside. Maybe not.
The Discussion
We’ve certainly lost the discussion. This will garner much push back, I know. This is not to say discussion about film has vanished, but it has largely funneled into podcast niches. In many respects, it isn’t a discussion at all. We’re just absorbing what other people write online about film, which is half a discussion at best.
Film went from a synchronous experience to an asynchronous one. Unfortunately, asynchronicity is inherently isolating. It’s toxic to conversation. It does to our discussions what a can of Coca-Cola will do to your teeth.
The Discovery
Then there’s discovery. In some ways we’ve gained enormously in the past few decades. So much cinematic output is available. Just swipe, tap your thumb, and voila!
But ask a UX designer about the paralysis of choice. Who among us has not spent the length of a TV episode trying to pick one TV episode to watch on Netflix?
Perhaps we’ve lost something with too much discovery. Maybe what we lost is the actual viewing of film, active viewing, undistracted viewing. Discover all you want, but if you’re side-eying your smart phone the whole time, did you really discover much?
The Beginning
There’s other things we’ve lost. I’ve only begun to think through them all, but my plan is to write about each one of them.
What happens when our distribution channels move from a la carte monetization to subscription? Do the kinds of movies that get made change? When so much of film history finds its way into a nearly limitless library, do we retain more of it? Or do we simply lose most of it under the sheer tonnage of poor user interfaces?
I hope you join me on this little inquiry. We may learn nothing new, but who doesn’t love to read the words we used to use?