Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place

2. Getting to “Going to the Show”

31 One of the first books I was assigned to read in graduate school more than thirty years ago was a collection of essays by Andre Bazin titled, in its English translation, What Is Cinema?1 David Rodowick introduces The Virtual Life of Film2 by arguing that nearly a half-century of scholarly books, journal articles, and conferences have still not produced a consensual answer to Bazin’s foundational interrogative. For the most part, this “continual state of identity crisis,” as Rodowick puts it, has concerned the aesthetic identity and character of cinema. But in the meantime, technological change has shifted the very material ground upon which cinema hasrestedformorethanacentury,pushingthecinemastudiesthreatlevel from orange to red. As the reassuring physicality of celluloid is rapidly supplanted by immaterial digital simulations, what, Rodowick asks, is left of cinema? “Is this the end of film, and therefore the end of cinema studies? Does cinema studies have a future in the twenty-first century?”3 Rodowick concludes (a few hundred pages later) that cinema and cinema studies can both withstand the metaphysical threat represented by technological change, even if that means adjusting the ontological boundaries a bit, so that a “film” shot, edited, distributed, and projected digitally in a movie theater is still “cinema,” but watching YouTube videos on an iPhone is, well, something other than cinema. In its most general outlines, my work is predicated upon a historicizingof Bazin’squery:“Whatwascinema?”OrasIwouldrephraseitslightly, “What has cinema been understood to be and by whom?” More than ten years ago I argued that the assumptions that films studies scholars had made for a generation about Hollywood cinema as a cultural industry, the spaces in which it was encountered, and about the normative modes two Getting to “Going to the Show” Robert C. Allen 32 · Robert C. A llen by which it was experienced were no longer valid.4 There were a number of drivers of this transformation, but one of the most consequential was the extraordinarily rapid diffusion in the early 1980s of home video as an alternative exhibition outlet. By the early 1990s, Hollywood was making more money from selling movies on videocassette—for people to keep and watch wherever, whenever, and however they pleased—than it did from selling tickets to see a film one time in a place that had become a concessionstandwithsmalldarkroomsattachedtoit.Forthepasttwenty years, watching movies in a movie theater has been irreversibly declining as a normative mode of the experience of cinema in the United States and throughout much of the world, and in the meantime an entire generation has grown up with their earliest, most formative, and most common experiences of movies occurring in places that until recently Hollywood consigned to the category of “non-theatrical” exhibition sites: bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, automobiles. In the process, a chasm has opened between what we might call the academic experience of cinema and the everyday experience of cinema. This experiential and, I would argue, ontological divide is generational as well. Our daughter, Madeline, was born in 1994. Her earliest and formative experiences of cinema occurred not in a movie theater, but in front of a television set connected to a VCR. For her, cinema is a textually disintegratedphenomenonexperiencedthroughmultipleandunpredictably proliferating sites and modalities. Her experience of cinema has always been decentered and fissiparous. Our students now studying some aspect of something identified by the academy as cinema at thousands of universities around the world are, figuratively speaking, Madeline’s older demographic sisters and brothers. In the United States they are all members of the seventy-two-million-strong echo boom generation born between 1977 and 1995—the second largest generational bulge in American history next to the post–World War II baby boom. For them, theatrical moviegoing has never been more authentic than any other way of experiencing cinema. My daughter’s experience of cinema is historically located on this side of an epochal divide. On the far side of that divide lies “cinema” as it would have been understood and experienced by her grandmother and great-grandmother. Born in 1921 and 1887, respectively, they were part of the moviegoing epoch, the century-long period of theatrical and extra- Getting to “Going to the Show” · 33 theatrical moviegoing in America, which I would argue extends from the advent of projected motion pictures in the mid-1890s to the mass adoption of the videocassette player in the 1980s. What links their experience of cinema...