The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

The End of Cinema As We Know It and I Feel . . . : An Introduction to a Book on Nineties American Film

The End of Cinema As We Know It and I Feel . . . An Introduction to a Book on Nineties American Film Jon Lewis ALMOST HALF A century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked, “I await the end of cinema with optimism.” Lots of us have been waiting ever since for this prophecy to finally come true. Nineties cinema was destined to be important even if it wasn’t any good. History is sometimes driven by chronology. Events happen because the calendar turns a rare and significant page. The nineties featured two such significant calendar events. First there was the celebration of film’s centenary. Surveys and retrospectives, reruns and retreads of old products and product lines were mounted in anticipation and celebration of the motion picture’s one-hundred-year anniversary. The centenary brought proof positive, if such proof was still necessary, that movies were the dominant art form and format of the twentieth century. Scholars and journalists alike encouraged a reexamination of the classical American cinema, the auteur renaissance, the so-called new Hollywood with an eye on each moment’s importance to “the American century .” The studios viewed the centenary as an occasion for nostalgia and self-congratulation, two sentiments they have always found easy to muster. From mid-decade on, the celebration of film’s past gave way to the inevitable countdown to the millennium. Films staging the end of the world proved to be exciting, profitable, and fun. Toying for an hour or two with some sort of revelation and rapture reflected and refracted a culture that awaited the end of this or that with irony if not optimism . The millennium (on and off screen) promised a sort of cosmic 1 spring-cleaning. Cinema loomed as a possible casualty. But nobody seemed all that worried. It wasn’t like there’d be nothing for us to watch in the movies’ absence. The way films were made and exhibited changed significantly at century’s end. The vast twenty-first-century entertainment marketplace now features all sorts of new audiovisual products and new ways to consume them (over and over again). Films, some of which are not exactly “films,” can now be projected on screens in significantly revamped theaters, in homes on big, highly resolved TVs with multichannel and multispeaker home entertainment setups, on little screens in minivans and on home computers, or on private, personal viewers we can strap on like those telephones travel agents use. But with all this new gear, and all sorts of new product, will we necessarily get different, better movies? Or might we someday in the not so distant future look back on the ’90s with nostalgia and wonder how things might have been different, if . . . ? This book assumes the historic importance of nineties American cinema and endeavors to examine the key films and filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles, and audiovisual technologies . . . cinema as we once knew it before the dust of the twentieth century had fully and finally settled. SOME QUICK OBSERVATIONS ON THE NINETIES The movie business in the nineties was characterized by an increasing concentration of industrial power among a select group of multinational players. Relevant here are four big mergers—Time and Warner Communications, Paramount Communications and Viacom, the Disney Corporation and Capital Cities/ABC, and Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting (a deal complicated further by an end-of-the-century merger-in-principle with America Online). To this growing conglomeration and vertical and horizontal integration, we can add some significant inter-industry developments: strategic alliances between Internet companies, telephone carriers, cable television outfits, and what were once upon a time just film studios. Nineties Hollywood was dominated by five companies that controlled the industry more completely than the old studio trusts ever did. This conglomeration was accompanied by growing internationalization . As the importance of foreign markets increased, Japanese, French, 2 JON LEWIS Australian, Canadian, and Italian companies, at one time or another during the decade, took control of a major “American” film studio. By decade’s end the term “American film” had become relative, perhaps even obsolete. New technologies radically changed production, distribution and exhibition. Forrest Gump (1994), one of the biggest hits of the decade, ably exploited computer-generated imagery, so much so it made possible , even inevitable, a future cinema in which location shooting and live production might become obsolete. More and...