Interesting pieces on a film that's just shown at Cannes, Chacun son Cinema which translates to To Each Their Own Cinema. Like Paris, Je'Taime it's an anthology of short films by a group of amazing directors, in some ways much more impressively. Too many to list, but Takeshi Kitano, Wong Kar-Wai, and Tsai Ming Ling are there (no one from Korea). Each filmmaker was asked to make a film about the state of cinema.

This led to a press conference in which Atom Egoyan and Roman Polanski ended up debating the state of things and Polanski walking out. The difference with this and other anthology films is that this one is getting excellent reviews and is part of a much larger essential debate. What exactly is the place of cinema now? There have been protestations of the death of cinema since the postwar period here and there (I think Wim Wenders, one of the directors here, did a series of interviews in the early 80s with filmmakers on the fact that cinema was dying, which is funny to read in hindsight), and no technology has yet to completely diminish its collective cultural power. But it is different now, and that's discernible and obvious. The current generation of youth have a different relationship to the medium than we do.

Reading old reviews of Jodorowsky's El Topo reminds me that there was a time when a cult movie had a much larger power, akin to that of an art exhibition. It could only be seen collectively and with much effort and in certain cities late at night and could not be rewound, paused, commentated upon. I don't think cinema is dying whatsoever, but it is losing some of its sacred power undoubtedly, but its inevitable. We live in an age of commentary and disruption of illusion; magickal processes are meant to be transparent now. Some things are better with a bit of mystery. I do believe the sanctity of the movie theater is lost forever. But the 30 second television commercial is probably going to die inevitably, and maybe even to some degree the music video for business reasons. But movies are perhaps by their accordance with vision and sound and their flickery alpha state inducing nature the closest thing we have to representing the shared state of our dreams, so they'll always be around.

If I had to make a 3 minute film about the state of cinema it'd revolve around something I can't forget from last summer... While leaving the tiny island of Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico, the local airstrip had a series of posters on your way out that were about what hopes the people had for the future of the island, as expressed by children in school. One said "I hope someday Vieques has a cinema". As a child in isolated and strange suburbia between Seattle and the Cascade Mountains movies were a door into a wider world I hungered for and couldn't get close to. I would watch anything that was foreign just so i could see more of the world. There will always be people with that hunger.