ABSTRACT
Sontag is not the only commentator to reach for the sententious, and nor is ‘late’ capitalism the only threat to cinema on the critical horizon. A similar sense of cinema reaching an end is found most notably in a parallel (and overlapping) discourse whose focus is technology.The arrival of the digital age for cinema has,
as John Belton argues, been a slow inauguration (Belton 2002). Emerging in the cinema of the 1970s in special effects, digitalisation has leaked into various areas of film production, distribution and exhibition in barely discernable ways. It is only in a wave of millennial anxiety that digitalisation has come to be positioned as the anti-hero about to slay the collective experience of film viewing. Belton sounds a cautious note about what digitalisation may signify, but other commentators tread less circumspectly. With the uptake of digital distribution systems streaming films straight into the home, it is argued, for example in the collection of essays edited by Jon Lewis, the direct distributor-consumer relationship has repositioned cinema as an optional mediation of these positions. And with the refurbishment of home-view technologies to create an ambient viewing space in the front room (the scale and dimension of screens, surround sound, additional and interactive DVD features) the particular experience of cinema-going is potentially eclipsed. As Lewis comments, ‘We can now envision a not so distant future in which we will never have to leave our houses to see a movie’ (Lewis 2001: 3).
