What has happened in the movie world in the last ten years? As Prospect launched in 1995, Heat, Seven and The Usual Suspects were all riding high at the box office. America had rediscovered the intelligent thriller, it seemed, and Braveheart quickened the pulse. Mainstream cinema wasn't in bad shape, but the sand was shifting under its feet. Film was changing, but few would guess how momentous those changes would be.
Consider the landmarks in film history over the last decade. Just before the birth of Prospect, a new film studio—Dreamworks SKG—emerged. The first fully computer-generated film, Toy Story, was released in 1995. Not only did it show us what films would look like for a generation to come, it revived the animated movie genre, which had been in the doldrums for decades. As a result, a new Academy award category—best animated feature—was created. At the same time, a group of Danish directors launched Dogme, a back-to-basics manifesto that set cinema on a march in the opposite direction: towards reality.
And that was only 1995. In 1996 the first DVDs were sold, and 300m of us have since bought machines to play them; they have become the fastest growing entertainment technology of all time. In 1997, Titanic became the most expensive film in movie history, and the one to take the most at the box office. Two years later, the Dogme-influenced Blair Witch Project showed that the internet would become crucial to the reception of cinema. The following year, 2000, Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys became the first Hollywood feature to be shot on high definition television (HDTV).
Moving away from Hollywood, during these years Iran was the most innovative filmmaking nation, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brought Chinese aesthetics to the attention of international filmgoers, and Mexico and Taiwan became centres of cinematic innovation.
Not since the 1950s had movies been so intriguing. Some of the significance of the story of film since 1995 is easy to see. The digitisation of the film process is not only changing the techniques of cinema, but protecting films against decay. Eventually, Hollywood will stop treating CGI as a new toy and use it intelligently and subtly. DVDs continue to confuse cinephiles: we love the way they store high-quality sound and picture but hate the thought that home-cinema might kill cinema-cinema.
Less obviously, there are two aesthetic facts that we must face in the DVD age. The first is that the canvas of cinema—its screen size—is getting smaller. In the past we saw films on a white rectangle 10 metres wide; now we are more likely to see them on a black rectangle less than one metre wide. This has profound implications for background composition and the scale of events within the frame. The second is that a movie is no longer a single, linear experience. We watch it, then listen to the director's commentary, or watch excised scenes. This allows filmmakers to be braver in the use of story and character points that are too hidden or complex to see on a first viewing.
Even these subtle shifts in the art of cinema over the last decade were predictable. No one, however, could foresee the dynamism of the global film world. The most exciting directors working today are Michael Haneke, Tsai Ming-Liang, Abbas Kiarostami, Aleksandr Sokurov, Samira Makhmalbaf, the Dardennes brothers, Pedro Almodovar, Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Ousmane Sembene, Claire Denis and Carlos Reygadas. An Austrian, two Taiwanese, two Iranians, a Russian, two Belgians, a Spaniard, an American funded by HBO, a Dane, a Senegalese, a French woman and a Mexican. Not since the 1920s has innovation in cinema been so globally dispersed. Some of this can be explained in financial terms—Taiwan's successful economy, the Mexican and Iranian governments' decisions to invest in film.
Least predictable of all has been the mainstreaming of documentary. In the last four years, documentary, which has almost never been commercially viable in theatres, has begun to make money. The success of films like Être et Avoir, Spellbound, Touching the Void, Fahrenheit 9/11 and now March of the Penguins (cost E8m, had taken $50m in the US by the end of August) revived the genre as Toy Story did for animation. September 11th outdid Hollywood in its images of horror and made the real world feel suspenseful, unfolding like a narrative. Beside it, fiction cinema looks ersatz.
Only in tying these three things together—digitisation, the re-emergence of non-western aesthetics and the return of the real—do we get the full, complex picture of cinema since 1995. That the central tool of the filmmaker is no longer a camera but a computer means that what is now showable goes far beyond what is merely filmable. Anything goes. Yet, wading through that "anything," what we find valuable in movies these days is the filmic voice of a young woman director from Tehran, or an Austrian's austere essays on the nature of violence, or a French documentarian's portrait of a rural primary school. Cinema is more interesting than it has ever been.
