The Demise of Cinema

When friends run silent movies with live musical accompaniment, I often attend. If a museum presents a movie made by American Indians, I try to see it. Other than that, I do not go to movies anymore, nor do I go to the theatre or concerts. I no longer enjoy any of that. Nonetheless, I do have a bit of fondness for the 1960’s and early 1970’s, when there was an interest in, and an excitement about, movies and theatre that were different, original, fresh, off-beat. I do have a fondness for the sense of community that a hole-in-the-wall Donald Pancho’s or Guild could invoke. Adding to the enticement was the incompetent structure of both those storefront conversions. Donald Pancho’s seemed like it belonged in a ghetto. The Guild was downright seedy. Though I much prefer the palatial theatres of old, I actually enjoyed those two little dumps. It was the audiences, the enthusiasm, the excitement of new discoveries that made those two tiny buildings comforting, reassuring, and even seductive. The audience members who conversed with total strangers as though they were lifelong friends, the movies that broke all the rules because they had never learned any of the rules, the buildings that were unnoticed by, even invisible to, everybody in town except for those who were actively seeking out æsthetic adventures, that is what appealed to social misfits such as myself. At a typical cinema, employees just go through the motions in return for a paycheck. Looking through the porthole window is a disheartening experience, seeing the screen disgraced with ever-more pabulum designed to deaden the imagination. To work in the Donald Panchoses and Guilds of the world, on the other hand, provided one with a sense of purpose. This was not merely a job to show time-killers to sedated masses. This was a mission to shake people out of their complacency, to change minds, to open people to new points of view, and to inspire imagination in everyday living. To look out the porthole windows and see new surprises each shift, and to witness the audiences reacting with enthusiasm, was exhilarating. Those days are definitively over. Who needs human interaction now that we have Smartphones?

What had happened? Despite popular perception, cinemas that presented mainstream Hollywood stuff never made money from showing movies. The larger theatres and cinemas were most often portions of larger complexes (skyscrapers, interconnected buildings), and the rental spaces subsidized the shows. Many cinemas were owned by larger corporations that made money from tax write-offs and real-estate investments. Beginning in the 1930’s, cinemas were built on cheap land on the edge of town. When blockbusting worked its magic, and when manipulation of property taxes forced people out of their homes, the suburban land skyrocketed in value. The corporations would then demolish the cinemas and sell the land beneath for massive profits. The “art houses” had a different business model. The profits were small, but they allowed the owners to save enough money to make personal investments elsewhere. From 1977 to about 1980, Betamax and VHS took a huge chunk out of admissions to the “art houses,” and there was not enough money saved to ride out the downturn. The “art houses” shuttered their doors and sold their buildings, often to developers. Had the “art houses” been able to ride out the depression, they could surely have cultivated new audiences, but that was impossible. Today there are only a few specialty cinemas, probably no more than a dozen altogether, generally in the largest cities, and if they survive (a big if), they do so only by the skin of their teeth. Once upon a time, not long ago, people congregated at public parks, at churches, at lecture halls, at concert halls. That still happens, but only on a small scale, and only among a certain demographic. Such gatherings are no longer universal. People no longer know their neighbors, nor do they want to. I certainly don’t. Theatre is now unaffordable, for multiple reasons, but mostly because the general audiences have vanished. Cinema was the last vestige of a public gathering place, and that is now forever gone. When people go to the cinema these days, they are surrounded by strangers who remain strangers. Superficially, the movie auditorium looks like a public gathering, but it is, truly, only multiple private gatherings.

The social milieux that encouraged a handful of money folks to pay a handful of talented filmmakers to make a few exceptional movies every year or two, the social milieux that encouraged daring audiences to seek out esoteric cinema that was from the heart, the social milieux that allowed offbeat cinemas to stay afloat by showing offbeat movies, well, those social milieux are all gone, entirely gone, and they shall never come back. Are there still good moviemakers? Well, yes, a few. For evidence, you may watch Rhymes for Young Ghouls and Johnny’s Gone and Kiss the Ground and Unrepresented and The Seventh Fire. They are astonishing works, but they are not and could not be anything like earlier movies. They couldn’t be done in a studio, because studios are not available for productions such as these. They couldn’t be done with a crew of professional architects and prop builders and wardrobe designers, because they are not available for such productions, and were probably never trained in anything but the current designs. The infrastructure no longer exists. These newer movies that I just mentioned never made the “Top 50” list in Variety. The “Bottom 50,” maybe. Do these good moviemakers make any profits? I don’t think so. Do their movies get shown widely? No. I mean, have you ever heard of them? I didn’t think so. Has anything made in the past 25 years been even a thousandth as good or as professional as The General or Pandora’s Box or Rome, Open City or Dr. Strangelove or Napoléon vu par Abel Gance or Dersu Uzala or The King of Hearts or Their Purple Moment or Le Magnifique or The Cocoanuts or Il disco volante or Mamma Roma or Flaming Fathers or His Marriage Wow or La voce della luna or La vacanza or King of Jazz or Pépé-le-Moko? No. There is no training ground for such writing, for such comedy, for such performing skills anymore. Nobody would finance such stories or productions anymore. If some reckless billionaire were to do so anyway, he would discover that there are no venues and no audiences. It’s over, over forever. Someday, within two generations, probably, on the assumption that humanity does not fry itself or bomb itself to extinction, there will be new events that will attract those who prefer thoughtful and thought-provoking and insightful entertainments. My guess is that they will be entirely unpretentious live performances in park gazebos and on street corners and in tents and in open fields and in the middle of demolition zones and in library conference rooms, mixtures of poetry, music, dance, mime, magic, puppetry, fairy tales, as in the days of old. This will be the new vaudeville. I wish I could live long enough to witness it.

Four+ decades later, I find myself more conflicted than ever before. Donald Pancho’s and The Guild were formative experiences for me, but they were also traumatic. If you have been through wars, attacks by gangs, threats by murderers and other maniacs, then you will laugh off my description of trauma as ridiculous: Getting canned from a part-time junk job run by a bunch of good-for-nothings is hardly anything to be traumatized over. Yet, as mild as it was, the context really did make the experience traumatic for me. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of those two dumps. I have never experienced anything remotely like it anywhere else, and I wish I could experience it again. Getting fired felt probably like what others experience in a divorce. It was devastating; it was like being excommunicated, banished. For decades I attempted to forget about Donald Pancho’s and The Guild, never to think of them again, yet, strangely, my clearest, most vivid memories are of Donald Pancho’s and The Guild and they dominate all my other memories. Which is stronger? The attraction or the repulsion? The love or the hate? I do not know. Oddly, I cannot bring myself to hate most of those who hated my guts, though I can honestly say that I would not be thrilled to meet most of them again. I would not object, but I would not be thrilled. You see, I have a lifelong aversion to those who don’t take their work seriously. They irritate me by their very existence, and I likewise irritate them. As for the product: Do I still love a handful of those wonderful movies? Certainly! Maybe as many as ninety or a hundred of them, altogether. Most movies are, I think, pathetic, the works of mindless hacks, and that includes most of the movies over which critics and intellectuals go into rapturous spells of ecstasy. They concentrate on smaller-than-life characters who do nothing more than argue and fight and spread misery and take up space. A few movies, though, are noticeably better than that. Do these better movies show at museums and archives where I now live? Yes, fairly frequently. Do I attend? No. I needed to escape from the escapism. Yet, even after all this time, I still have a place in my heart for Donald Pancho’s and The Guild. They helped form me, for better or for worse — probably for worse, but I don’t know. Even though I was unwanted by pretty much one and all, they remain a part of me.