Introduction

      One might think that the evolution of the cinema is an artistic evolution, that cinema evolves because artists demand change. Instead I believe that such evolution is dictated by the progress of technology. Technology, the sensitivity of film, provokes changes that are much more important than artistic volition.

      Andrzej Wajda

      Like the world, and like cinema itself in the course of the last century, the spectator has changed.

      Jean-Louis Comolli, “Suspension du spectacle”

      The age of cinema, it is commonly claimed, is now drawing to a close. Day after day signs of a profound change in our relationship with moving images proliferate. The winnowing of box office receipts, the shrinking size of the audience, the decreasing time lag between a film’s theatrical release and its commercialization on video, tele­vision’s growing cultural prestige: these indications—at once social, economic, and aesthetic—only make the prophecy all the more credible. If cinema for decades represented the standard and even optimal filmic experience, the touchstone for all other forms of viewing, this formerly undisputed and indisputable centrality is today contested at its very core.

      Perhaps, quite simply, a center no longer exists. In recent years the success of new means of image-reproduction has rendered the equation of cinema (the art of the film) with cinema (the place where films are shown) ever more fallacious. This ambiguity emerges with greater ease in languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, which do not distinguish between the two through the use of different terms, as American English does by referring to the place as the movie theatre or picture house. Bit by bit, we have become indifferent to whether we see a film on widescreen with Dolby Surround, on an eighteen- or forty-two-inch TV, on a laptop, or on our mobile phones. And the new generation will not even feel deprived for never having seen the work of their beloved directors and divas on the big screen.

      The transformation of technology and viewing habits has rendered instantly obsolete the questions that engaged intellectuals and cinephiles for decades. Who really wonders any longer whether the movie on TV last night was exactly the same as it was two years ago at the Rex or the Flora? The movie theatre’s decline and cinematic memory’s defection from film to video have forever delegitimized queries of that sort. From a technical point of view, the differences are not negligible, but they are not absolute either. It is true, for instance, that on television, films run at a rate of twenty-six frames per second in Europe and thirty in the United States instead of the filmic twenty-four, and thus are slightly shortened; it is also true that the small screen’s format reframes the images, sacrificing their edges. But the list of grievances could go on. The TV image is much less defined, and only thanks to the small screen size does it not appear unpleasantly grainy: in the American standard, video has a total of approximately 350,000 pixels per frame, whereas a 35mm negative instead has the equivalent of about 7 million pixels—a net ratio of 1:20. The same goes for color. While television is capable of producing a maximum contrast (the relationship between the image’s darkest and lightest parts) of 30:1, film can obtain a contrast factor of 120:1—four times as high. As a result, when a film is transferred to video, its colors become more luminous and intense, and the density and gradations of its blacks are immediately lost. The subtlest shadings consequently disappear.

      As Francesco Savio, one of the masters of Italian film criticism, wrote, “their dynamic qualities and tonal contrasts impoverished, movies on video are like gauze dipped in milk, whereas, projected, they reach the screen uncorrupted,