ABSTRACT
In the 1980s several European films featured the death of cinema. Sometimes a picture-house which had entertained an enthusiastic community for many years was shown as progressively deserted and finally obliged to close. In other cases a group of movie-buffs sadly recollected the wonderful 1960s, a period when life could be centred on the cult of ‘great’ movies. This wistful vision was characteristic of a decade which witnessed the end of separated, often opposed, national traditions in Europe and which was therefore keen on revisiting the past. Yet cinema was not really decaying. Films were financed by banks or industrial firms more often than by studios; they were sold to television networks or dealers in video-cassettes rather than to distributors and they were viewed on small screens rather than in cinemas, but the number of movies regularly issued and offered to the public was almost as great as it had been during the glorious period of the midcentury. The nostalgic films of the decade were also typical of their period inasmuch as they focused on a few people minutely observed in their daily activities. The cinema of the 1980s was akin to television; it provided television channels with prestigious, well-made products and at the same time it was deeply influenced by the practices of television companies which enquired into the life of various social strata and offered the result daily to their audiences. Caught between their desire to return to the past and the necessity of looking around them film-makers were also attracted, in two contradictory ways, by the sophisticated, highly intellectual legacy of the New Waves and by the more direct, much simpler style adopted by television. Films may no longer have been shot to be shown in picture-houses but, economically as well as artistically, they were still important enough to furnish social
scientists with relevant information about the tastes and the main concerns of the period.
