(My thoughts on the below were cross-posted at Current – to read Current readers responses click here)

Don’t know about you but I was excited to hear that Francis Ford Coppola thinks cinema is collapsing:

“The cinema as we know it is falling apart,” says Francis Ford Coppola.

“It’s a period of incredible change,” says the director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” “We used to think of six, seven big film companies. Every one of them is under great stress now. Probably two or three will go out of business and the others will just make certain kind of films like ‘Harry Potter’ — basically trying to make ‘Star Wars’ over and over again, because it’s a business.”

Coppola, 70, sporting a dark suit, is being interviewed in the Lebanese capital Beirut, where his latest movie “Tetro” opened the Beirut Film Festival after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

“Cinema is losing the public’s interest,” says Coppola, “because there is so much it has to compete with to get people’s time.”
The profusion of leisure activities; the availability of movies on copied DVD and on the Internet; and news becoming entertainment are reshaping the industry, he says. Companies have combined businesses as customers turn to cheap downloads rather than visit shops or movie theaters.

“I think the cinema is going to live off into something more related to a live performance in which the filmmaker is there, like the conductor of an opera used to be,” Coppola says. “Cinema can be interactive, every night it can be a little different.”

Course we should pay attention when Coppola speaks on the future of cinema.

His prediction of ‘electronic cinema’ was absurdly prescient and his early-80’s insight while shooting ‘One From the Heart’ of what would happen when box office totals started appearing in newspapers, i.e. “this would turn the movies into sports” was so spot on that it chills me now to think of it, (how else to explain the championing of crap, of films like G.I. Joe and Transformers unless you look at them through the lens of sports – to fanboys these films are their teams, so of course they have to be defended and praised in the face of what I guess we used to call ‘good taste’).

Anyhew I was excited – of course it’s apparent that current cinema going culture and cinema production itself is in crisis:

Hollywood film output likely to fall by a third

but having this old lion of the hey-day of U.S. Cinemas Golden Age vocalise what’s happening helps focus the mind on the problem ya know?

Here’s some interesting parts of the mix:

• Collapse of funding sources leading to reduction in number of traditional commercial films produced.
• Proliferation of multiple devices to view ‘cinema’, (Phones, MP3 players, computers, and all the variants in between); should media be deliberately designed from the ground up to be seen on multiple devices? Read this fascinating interview with the always worthwhile Cory McAbee for his thoughts on the matter re his new multi-platform series ‘Stingray Sam’; (of course it’s not just the traditional ‘movie business’ that’s collapsing – all recordable media production is going through wrenching change – here’s a similar example of McAbee’s model from the world of publishing: Cory Doctorow kicks off a unique publishing experiment.
• Dramatic reduction in the cost of producing cinema:  we’ll be discussing the film ‘Gaia – Daughter of Chaos’ on an upcoming show, (disclaimer – the film was a sponsor of last week’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ episode); ‘Gaia’ was shot on a budget of $28,000 and it looks fantastic – just as fantastic as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ which came in at a price-tag of over $75,000,000.
• Dramatic reduction in non-traditional movie distribution costs – YouTube, Libsyn etc.
• Of course if producing and distribution is cheap then what’s the real problem in getting your film seen – ahhh, marketing – with an infinite amount of content out there how are will the audience for your pic find out about it?
• Cinema conventions seeping into everyday life:  when I approach my car at night it’s interior lights fade up. When I exit its lights fade down – it’s as if movie grammar itself were leaking into the real world; my OS does the same thing – it’s gentle fades and dissolves resemble nothing more than avant-garde cinema of the past.

Ok – so with all this going on I ask you Dear Reader – does cinema have a future and if so what is it?

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Here’s some bonus thoughts from ‘The Secret Data Within’, (a post from earlier this year), regarding the emergence of self-generated machine creativity in cinema/image making:

Via Metafilter comes this most intriguing video by Chairlift (click here for the far superior High Def Version):

It’s intriguing because the majority of ‘effects’ seen in the video are created by manipulating the means of video compression used to ‘encode/compress’ the video, (if you’ve ever done digital video editing you know what I mean).

What this does is reveal the secret data structures within the moving image – cause you know, when we record digital video the machine doesn’t actually record what’s in front of us, like film and analog video used to do – instead common codecs often only record changes that occur. From Wikipedia:

“Video compression typically operates on square-shaped groups of neighboring pixels, often called macroblocks. These pixel groups or blocks of pixels are compared from one frame to the next and the video compression codec (encode/decode scheme) sends only the differences within those blocks.”

What does this mean? Well, take a look at the video below – I’m moving, so new information is being recorded on a regular basis – but the background is not moving – so the bricks behind me are not in the same time-frame as I am, they are the exact same bricks, (frozen in time), from the first second of the video – it’s a composite of past and future:

Well, so what?

I tell you what: stills from your digital camera, video, YouTube, cable, DVDs, whatever – anything that uses these compression technologies, are not recordings of the world – they’re approximations, or more accurately , imagined models/representatives of the world.

This is so new that we’re still using the old language of the photo-chemical/analog – recordings – as if we’re taking an accurate snapshot of the world, (and no, I’m not going to go into the whole cropping = photos are not ‘reality’ thing here – even with cropping there’s the underlying assumption that in the initial photo the events exposed in front of the lens actually happened, actually existed).

Well, no more. With these new technologies we’re stepping away from the real and inserting an additional decision maker, an artificial brain, in-between us and the subject. In cinema we’ve seen the effect clearly that new technology has on the actual work product itself, (films becoming more ‘cutty’ as non-linear editing systems like Avid became the norm – yikes it was slow-going cutting film, gluing it/pasting it, now BAM ZOOM, CSI up in here); these new technologies will have a far more profound effect.

It’s happening gradually and stealthily, but the merger of humans with the machine is happening, and the emergence of self-generated machine creativity is now underway.

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Photo of Francis Ford Coppola at top adapted from an original image by Ozgur POYRAZOGLU