Necrocinephilia, or, The Death of Cinema and the Love of Film: An Introduction by the Guest Editor

Abstract

In 1995, at the centenary of the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière’s invention of the cinématographe, the device that made public viewing of moving pictures possible, Susan Sontag assessed 100 years of film history thus: ‘Cinema, once heralded as the art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes […], to be a decadent art’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she thought capitalism was the culprit, finding ‘movie making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world’ devoted to the production of ‘films made purely for entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes’ that were ‘astonishingly witless’ – a form of ‘derivative film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art’ capable only of ‘reproducing past successes’. Sontag died in 2004, so she did not have the pleasure of seeing Avengers: Endgame (2019), the fourth film in the Avengers series and the twenty-third feature in the Marvel Comics franchise (now owned by Walt Disney productions), nor did she have the satisfaction of knowing that it is now the highest grossing film in cinema history, having banked almost $2.8 billion in box-office gross to date. Ever the cosmopolitan internationalist, Sontag would likely have found scant solace in knowing that just shy of 70% of that enormous haul came from foreign distribution. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if Sontag were alive today she might well look back to the decadent year of 1995 as the golden age of cinema (the year, after all, of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, Brian Singer’s The Usual Suspects, and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse).