A Very Fragile Cinemecology

A principal reason I undertook this movieclub was an awareness that great movies flit through this town, with the stealth of a spring breeze. They arrive. They disappear. Few notice. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, The Visitor and Edge of Heaven were three recent ones. Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that Caos Calmo has now disappeared from the AMC slate after only 3 ½ weeks, before we got to look at it, despite being on the city’s Top Ten List, despite great word-of-mouth.

Alas, Caos Calmo is off to its Shangri-la of digital immortality: to be reincarnated , reshaped as digital data: dvd, bittorrent download; to be up-loaded cheaply onto iPods without the interception of distributors or exhibitors. One more reminder we now all dwell in cyberstan.

We are witnessing our era disappear: a movie era that’s been disintegrating most of our lifetimes, the moviehouse becoming as inevitably extinct as the vaudeville and burlesque houses of that of our folks. Even in their time, two Golden Age classics, Citizen Kane and Casablanca were substantial but not spectacular box-office success. Despite raves, when first released, each struggled to cover its budget. Mass television in the fifties nearly killed movies. The palatial movie houses closed. colour TV in the Sixties persuaded millions to stop going altogether. Goodbye the neighborhood moviehouse.

Our generation has borne witness to this titanic clash in many arenas – LPs v. napster, love letters v Facebook, musical halls v iPods, mailmen v. iMessenger. Cybergadgetry now rules – zines, evites, cybersurfing. Videos and DVDs have pretty much wiped out movie theaters in Asia and Eastern Europe. Excentris, as magnifient a movie house as has ever bee ndesigned, is about to close. The multiplexes are boarding up in suburbia. While it’s difficult to conceive of great movies, such as Caos Calmo, divorced from movie theatres, the fact is the studios' Shangri-la is digital , not the AMC.

I find myself, in spite of myself, a big zip.ca subscriber with its library of about 70,000 titles. Much of zip.ca business comes from cinephiles like us, screening semi-obscure, not otherwise easy to find movies - on our computers, our iPods, our dvds.

We must face up to the prospect, within what remains of our lifetimes, that if we want to watch Caos Calmo, we will have to stay home, watch the Caos Calmo HD version, transferred onto Blueray, each frame containing 490,000 colour pixels, providing more detail, nuance, and depth than the AMC. And more than likely we will be alone. No popcorn machine. No one to laugh (or cry) with. In the meantime, before they (and we) are forever extinct, we should celebrate both the moviehouses and their movies. Ergo, my-pov.ca.