That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think of denying today. To do the current round of think piece writers one better, we will add that not only are the movies dead, but they also died in the cradle, and they've only been getting deader since—occasional signs of life having likely only been gas leaving the body.
Here's a quick primer on 10 of cinema's multiple last gasps. Per Ecclesiastes 1:9, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
1910s: Invented at the turn of the last century, the movies fail entirely to develop to their potential as a vehicle for narrative art, remaining instead a disreputable fairground attraction appealing only to the illiterate, scrofulous, and ill-bred. They're also life-threatening at both ends of production, a fire risk when projected on silver nitrate while equally perilous for performers in front of the camera. (The San Francisco Chronicle of March 30, 1913, warns that "Dangers Lurk in Film Posing.") Taken as anything but novelty, films themselves are, alas, "elementary peoples' pleasure," according to the Los Angeles Times: "The highbrows who do not want baby food, naturally enough, leave such [photo] plays alone" (July 23, 1919).
1920s: Radio arrives, tethering many entertainment-seekers to the parlor—and close behind looms the specter of the "Telechirograph." According to the November 2, 1925, L.A. Times, this new German device will use wireless technology to project films "through the ether," thus eliminating 35mm prints and the business of film distribution. Just as well. The screen drama persists in plying heretofore unimaginable levels of banality: " missing-twin plots," "sloppy endings," "custard-pie throwers," "tears and horseplay and melodrama" (L.A. Times, July 10, 1921). The following year, a critic in the same paper isolates "The Predicament of the Minority": "They always felt that higher standards in the cinema art as in other lines of creation or production would at last prevail—that some time the golden age would arrive. Fatuous hope!"
1930s: Finally verging on that longed-for golden age, the increasingly eloquent silence of cinema is abruptly drowned out in tinny cacophony. New York Times critic Herman G. Weinberg opines, "The cinema's vast potentialities as an art form were about to be realized when the advent of sound put a sudden end to further experiment. When the movie found it had a voice grafted to it by the laboratory, it began to talk, but it was the voice of a televox, and it gave forth sterile blabberings" (July 18, 1937). Talkies might have even hastened the next World War! Per the Chicago Tribune: "Instead of bringing universal peace to the world, talking pictures are creating riots" (November 2, 1930).
1940s: United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. breaks the back of the studio monopoly, which was at least efficient in producing dross. "People are staying away from the movies" (New York Times, July 1948), as postwar "auds" are too busy procreating, and movies fail to place in "competition with other forms of entertainment such as television, night dog racing, and night baseball" (Chicago Tribune, August 1948).
1950s: Between 1950 and 1960, the number of televisions in American homes jumped from 6 million to 60, and weekly film attendance halves between 1946 and '56. ("Hollywood has indeed worked itself into such a lather of apprehension that a large measure of its hopes for a brighter tomorrow is riding on the Hecht-Lancaster production Trapeze, co-starring Burt Lancaster, Gina Lollobrigida, and Tony Curtis" [New York Times, July 1953].) Cheap "runaway productions" filmed in other countries make Tinseltown a ghost town. "The mess we're facing in movies and other media promises to be the worst era in the history of art," wrote Manny Farber in "Hard-Sell Cinema" from Perspectives in 1957.
1960s: Broke after spectacular flops like Cleopatra, the studios become the playthings of corporations whose widget-salesman decision-makers have no mind for showbiz; "not since the start of the talkies nearly four decades ago has the movie industry gone through a total overhaul like this—new policies, new faces, new corporate control," wrote the Times' Peter Bart in 1966, just before quitting to go Hollywood, Dwight Macdonald asks in Esquire, "Why can't we make movies anymore?" In L.A., Michael Bay is born.
A spectacular flop.
1970s: Did we say 10? Oops.
1980s: While VCRs, cable TV, and video game consoles conquer young eyeballs, a coke-hungover New Hollywood's excess has allowed the blockbuster model to take over the new multiplexes. "The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets, I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience, they're inheriting an audience. . . . There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies," wrote Pauline Kael in "The Numbers" from The New Yorker in 1980.
1990s: The success of postmodern, cheeky-violent Pulp Fiction unmoors genre films from social reality and moral relevance, signifying the onset of decadence. And PU! What's that smell? Why, it's "The Decay of Cinema," announced by Susan Sontag in 1996 in The New York Review of Books: "Cinema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline." David Mamet in an August 1995 L.A. Times is no less bleak: "The pornographic and the mass-market Hollywood-film string together titillating instances of sex, violence, and emotional exploitation—these instances separated by boring bits of nonsense called, in the trade, backstory, or narration. The contempt with which these interstices are treated is a reassurance to the consumer view that better will be coming soon."
2000s: Video games outsell films. The digital revolution's new advances undermine the hallowed veracity of the photographic, analog, celluloid image. The remaining theatrical audience begins its final, inexorable contraction as viewers retreat behind laptops, iPhones, YouTube, XTube, et al., and rampant piracy bites into profit margins. "Mumblecore" is deemed important, and defined-in-opposition festival/art house aridity reaches an all-time high. The exodus from print media shifts chicken-little rhetoric into the digital realm, Internet think pieces on the death of cinema, ad nauseam. After a long illness, cinema is finally to be laid to rest at a service outside the Edison Labs in West Orange, New Jersey, on November 14, 2012. It will be buried in a Black Maria.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
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Wait, was this serious? I would have sworn it was a parody. It was pretentious, cynical, unrepentantly biased, and overall idiotic. Darn you, Poe's Law!
If you're listening, please don't post any more articles like these. This was dumb, and it can only get dumber from here. If it was a parody, it was a bad parody.
Damn,shenanigans have been declared. I'll go get the broom-sticks... sigh.
The site feels weird, plus I haven't seen Abraxas skulking around, which means he's loose in the world again! I'm putting bars on my windows.
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It's fine to post articles from another site but make them appropriate to your intended audience.
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I'm starting to think Topless Robot should've been abandoned when Rob left. This garbage shames the site's legacy.
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Even as a reprint from another source,this has got to be the most cynical stab at the state of hollywood I've read in quite some time.The notion the silent era failed to achieve art status is complete BS."Intolerance" or "Sunrise",anyone?.Television didn't become a threat until the early '50s,the idea the threat existed as far back as 1925 is ludicrous.The film industry was trying to find a happy co-existence with Television by producing a form of visual entertainment on a scale that T.V. couldn't convey-"Ben-Hur","Lawrence Of Arabia" being examples."Cleopatra" may be a lesson in out-of-control production,but that isn't representative of the film industry in general.We need more fun & honesty in what we read on TR.I'm already missing Rob.
Sorry,but this isn't exactly the kind of thing I like to read on a friday.Film is one my favorite subjects,so I took it kind of personally.Again sorry.
@zathras6767 but this is an awesome defense of cinema! It just says that even though people have declared its "death" over and over, it just keeps growing and getting better! But yes, I understand your feelings, I started reading with the same idea, then I saw the first quote is from the 1910s and I was like "oh"
@sanzsolo @zathras6767 Satire this heavy-handed and overwrought threatens to become the very thing it makes fun of...in this case, pretentious doom-sayers of the "death" of film.
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I agree with some of the other posters. As a long time reader and commenter, I think the tone of this article is off. Yes, I know incoming editors and writers will have their own style of writing, but where's a humor? Where's the jabs at the studios' attempts to get audiences?
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It would be better to just let the site have a week hiatus than cross-posting these articles. They are generally poorly (Wikipedia) researched, don't fit the tone of this site at all, and are quickly turning Topless Robot from a fun, light look at the world of geekdom into... I have no idea. But not anything good. There are tons of sterile, unenjoyable "articles" on the web written for cross-posting purposes. Let's not have them here.
The only thing this is inspiring me to do is to bring my site back to life.
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...says the company that used to have their magazines in print. These are the worst articles. Because they are, in fact, articles. If I want nerd news I'll check out 1000 other sites. I want opinions on things that are based in some sort of reality. Movies are dead? Fine, write an awesome paragraph on why.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!!!!
No mention of the failures of the 70s? The Godfather insisted of itself, and Star Wars laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the prequels....
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That's ridiculous. Movies aren't dead. To suggest they are is laughable. Look how much Avengers grossed this summer. Did you hear more Star Wars movies are coming? Pixar delivers quality every year.
Movies are alive and well.
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@joefiore1976 sarcasm, people, sarcasm! The article is making fun of how much people have declared the death of cinema for 100 years!
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I read this on the Village Voice site two days ago and they have a very distinctive tone to their articles, a tone that does not jibe with that of Topless Robot. Seriously, please re-think posting their articles. I may not speak for all of Topless Robot's regular readers, but I'm willing to wait until a new editor is chosen and new material is generated. I check this site pretty much first thing every morning, so I will definitely be keeping an on developments as they happen.
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You speak on my behalf, sir or ma'am. I agree, let's not have this cross-posting of bullshit articles from other sites that either aren't very interesting, or really seriously don't fit the tone of Topless Robot at all.
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Most pessimistic article ever. It's a list of failures that have occurred in film over the years, and people's reactions to them at the time. I thought this would be a list of the hokey devices studios used in the hopes of bringing in more audiences (3D, Smell-o-vision, etc.) I strongly believe that the theater experience is still unique and cannot be recreated at home. You may be able to pirate a new release movie, play it on your 70" plasma screen in full surround sound while eating popcorn, but still isn't the same. As long as I can sit in a giant room with strangers experiencing a movie on an epically large screen, I will do so.
I think that with every advance in media from our first days of banging rocks together to using our cellphones to watch movies and TV, certain things will always be considered "dead" or "dying". Imagine in the next couple years when people start saying Blu Ray and the internet our dead too. While i certainly don't live in a movie theatre and go every night, it is still nice to know that it is there if i need it and isn't that really the point?
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So according to this article, film died two days ago. Somebody better tell the Hobbit cast and crew the bad news./sarcasm
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I laughed, it's so true, Cinema has been called dead so many times it hysterical that people feel that it's still possible. There will always be doomsayers.
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@Lithroe What I see is that over and over people forget that it's about story and opt to head down the blind ally of "spectacle" instead.
That and a decided lack of self loathing in the article.
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Seems a bit wordy for TR. I like reading about the history of cinema, (we have a film critic author in the UK called Mark Kermode who writes interesting stuff like this) but when I come to TR i expect more snappy stuff. Hopefully the new Ed will get things back on track.
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>>Yawn<<
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an ironic look at all of the times cinema was supposed to be "dead" or a straight on analysis of business decisions made a hundred years ago.
Tone seems.... off for this website.
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That picture makes me sad, take it down. Those eyes... <sob> poor little Twinkie... you will be missed you golden, goo-filled, bastard. :(
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@gagagalvatron @simon260681 @Gallen_Dugall @James.k.Polk
We have more important things to worry about!
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@simon260681 Not a bad thing. At least we have a place for discussion.
And hopefully the overlords will read the comments and keep in mind that we're wanting a little more than articles about all cinema ever or the 10 Most Evil Monkeys in Geekdom That the List Writer Missed
Nerd news, humor and self-loathing. Edited by Luke Y. Thompson
