As a boy I always loved the bit in a cowboy movie when, after the gunfight, with the smoke from Colt .45s still in the air, the undertaker, dressed in black, would run out on to the street and measure up the bodies. Judging by the film and entertainment press in recent years, the little men in black clothes are scurrying around the corpse of cinema as we speak, measuring it up for its wooden overcoat. Box office takings are down in many countries. Hollywood's sequelitis shows that it is running out of ideas. According to the Guardian, French audiences are no longer queuing up for chin-stroking art cinema. DVD and home cinema is a threat to old-fashioned moviegoing as a social activity. Writer and critic Gilbert Adair summed things up when he said that, movie-wise, "the tube of toothpaste is almost empty… we are squeezing out the last drops." One of the best writers on cinema in the English language, David Thomson, says that the films of Abbas Kiarostami, celebrated by many of us as among the greatest of their time, are "funerary art."
I'm not convinced. Take the following. Recently a DVD of the East German fantasy film The Singing Ringing Tree by Francesco Stefani (1957) plopped on to my doormat. Although it thrilled me as a child, it's been very hard to see since—until now. The DVD cover says the film has been digitally remastered and, sure enough, it looks and sounds gorgeous, as vivid as the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps from sepia into Technicolor. The week before, I received a seven-DVD box set of the complete films of the landmark Scottish animator Norman McLaren—15 hours of material, including 15 documentaries on his work. Stefani's film and most of McLaren's have been dead to me for decades in the very real sense that they were very hard to see. DVD labels are bringing them back to life. They are, in a way, remastering cinema. Multiply these examples by tens of thousands and you realise that, like some filmic day of judgement, cinema's long buried past is coming back from the grave.
But isn't that confusing the love of film with cinema itself? Thomson, Adair and the trade press are not saying that the love of cinema is dying, but that cinema itself is. Again, I disagree. Back to my DVDs of The Singing Ringing Tree and McLaren's work. From the spring, 240 screens in 200 cinemas across Britain will be equipped with extremely high-quality digital projection systems. The resulting Digital Screen Network will, it is estimated, be programming an annual 165,000 extra screenings of non-mainstream films by 2011. That's nearly 500 more screenings per day of good movies. Put my new DVDs into one of these new systems and they will still project well on to a movie screen. Films that are similarly remastered, but at even higher resolutions, look as good as (some would say better than) 35mm when projected; plus, crucially, they will not scratch or collect dust. I've seen many such projections, on some of the biggest screens in the world, and they were sparkling, rich and true. The average 35mm film print costs at least £1,000; a digital copy will cost a tenth of that. The latter is the size of a shoebox, whereas the former is far bigger, so shipping costs are greatly reduced. Tot up all these benefits, and the reasons for not screening films start to disappear. Digitising is set to revive film exhibition. It is turning back the clock on film history in a way that has never happened before.
But even if this is the case, film production isn't thriving, is it? Well, if you take the broad view, it is. As I've argued before in this column, animated film is in its best state since the heyday of Disney. Until its belated breakthrough in the mid-1990s, documentary had never really been commercially viable in the cinemas, but look at it now. And although mainstream film in English or Hindi (the two main languages of populist cinema) is a bit depressing, in the last generation, for the first time, nearly every part of the world has been making great films. Countries as varied as Iran, Mexico, Belgium, Austria, Australia, Germany, Taiwan, Spain, France, China, Russia, Japan, Senegal, Hong Kong, Thailand, Mauritania and Denmark have produced breathtakingly imaginative work. The art of film is so international now that it's hard to keep up. Not even in the 1960s, the time of the famed new wave in movies, was innovation so widespread.
Even before digitisation was having much effect, in the 1990s, new cinematic shoots were sprouting on every continent. The rebirth of film history is feeding this. The old film industry business plan may be as dead as a dodo but the art of film is far from dead. It is undergoing a renewal. Adair's tube of toothpaste is full. The wee man with the tape measure had better find other things to bury.
