Blog #5: Melancholia and Mourning: The Death of Cinema

In Melancholia, we follow the lives of Justine and Claire, two sisters coping with the end times as a rogue planet hurls towards Earth.  One moment captured my attention, and visualized the dichotomy in opinion regarding cinema today; it spoke to where we were, where we are, and where we might head next.  At one point, we see Justine walking on the sprawling lawn of the estate, at night, and two beacons light the sky. One is the moon, and the other, the planet Melancholia.  They sit separately in the air, with an apparent visual distance between them, but their light melds and meshes together by the time it hits Earth.  This perfectly contextualizes how I feel cinema has evolved in the past ten years.  Some claim the death of cinema, for technical or cultural reasons, but others believe it offers variety and impact even now; the main rift is between those who view cinema as art and those who view it as industry.  I believe that these philosophies may have been mutually exclusive at the beginning of this century, but like anything that defines human culture now, they melt together.

I compare cinema to music. Each struggles with two opposing philosophical factions (popular vs. artistic), critics who argue the death of the experience (watching in a theater or listening to an entire album uninterrupted), and incredibly rapid technological advances.  I look at the advent of digital cinema and computer innovation through an optimistic lens.  When cinema was on film, we had poorly made movies and masterpieces alike.  Why has that changed now?  Now the exploitative uses of the technology do not deter us from finding the films that address our life, our culture.  On one hand we have virtual robo-porn (cough...Transformers...cough), but on the other hand we have a film like Melancholia that uses CGI technology to further capture the human condition, commenting on issues and emotions that encapsulate so much about life.  We cannot give up on cinema as an integral part of our cultural identity.  We may never recapture the cinematic-viewing environment, but we will always have the cinema as an ideal, a way to best employ contemporary tools to visually define and discuss our world.