American Cinematographer - January 2021 - 49

Salvatore Cascio in a memorable shot from
director Giuseppe Tornatore's bittersweet
Cinema Paradiso (1988).

" We are not the film audience, watching a movie for a few hours
and then moving on with our real lives. We live reel lives, a
species of happy, lost souls cached inside our own realities.
'The movies' are and always will be our lives. "

Behind a curtain in the theater entryway,
Totò also stares at the screen. Slightly bucktoothed and open-mouthed, he is transfixed
by the flickering images, a celluloid prelude to
the adventures of adulthood soon to unspool in
his own life. It is the future filmmaker's transcendent look that speaks to all of us who have
followed the same path as this modest boy into
our own magical world of cinema.
Whether you are 8-year-old Totò from a
backwater Sicilian village, or from an elite
Upper East Side cineaste family that refers to
the movies as critic Ricciotto Canudo's " Seventh Art, " or a veiled Iranian woman embracing
film not only as art but also as an agent of social change, or a recently rediscovered woman
pioneer of silent cinema, you are, like the rest
of us, mesmerized by this art form in constant
technical and aesthetic flux. The full breadth
of human emotions that the movies document
continues to surprise and engage audiences
- as well as us filmmakers. We, the cinema's
sleight-of-hand artists, savvy to the tricks, are
every bit in thrall to its magic.
Every generation of filmmakers since the
Lumière brothers, who mounted cinema's first
public exhibition in Paris in December 1895,
has confronted change and challenges. Some of
these have broadened the creative spectrum of
how we make movies; others have been technical; and still more have been changes beyond
filmmakers' control, whether it be the commercial ups and downs of an art form deeply
dependent on box-office returns, or transforbooth, the aging 35mm projector is manned mative changes such as television in the 1950s,
by the grizzled Alfredo. The images pouring home video in the 1970s, digital production in
out of the projection port, a plaster leonine the 2000s, or - something no one could have
cast, are from Jean Renoir's 1936 classic The predicted - a deadly virus.
As I write this, many months after movie
Lower Depths. At every kiss or intimate sexual
moment between actors Jean Gabin and Junie theaters across the United States shut down,
Astor, Father Adelfio rings the Sanctus bell, sig- filmmakers and studios are struggling to make
naling Alfredo to insert a piece of paper into the movies within the safety guidelines dictated
spooling film reel - to excise frames depicting by Covid-19, and the future remains uncertain.
physical intimacy - before showing the movie Several times a week, I drive past the Vista Theto the local townspeople. It is a " final cut " be- atre on Sunset Boulevard in Los Feliz. It opened
on Oct. 9, 1923, with a feature titled Tips,
yond any director's ken.

starring Baby Peggy. Its marquee now features
not a current-release title, but the words " To
be continued... " In a kind of irony, the marquee
stands about a football field's distance from the
site where D.W. Griffith built the Babylon set for
his epic 1916 film Intolerance.
Each major change during cinema's evolution seems to augur a generational change in
the men and women who make movies, and
Covid-19 is no exception. This time, it is those
most vulnerable to the virus - those more
advanced in years - who may stand aside,
becoming filmgoers once again, rather than
makers. This opens portals for new and younger filmmakers.
The waters they must navigate as emerging
artists are uncertain. The gnawing question
of " What is a film? " - which preoccupied the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
during the two years I was its president - is
still on the table, as theatrical exhibition struggles to contend with ever-expanding streaming
platforms and 4K home screens. Will audiences' desire to laugh or cry together in the dark
with hundreds of fellow viewers return, or will
the 100 " monitor in the living room become
the new normal? How we will make our future
movies is in the balance.
Writing several months ago about this
crossroads, I had a somewhat dystopian view
of cinema's future, but during a recent virtual meeting of the National Film Preservation
Board, where I joined several dozen film scholars, historians and archivists (and a few other
actual filmmakers), my belief in the timeless
magic of cinema was reaffirmed. As a student,
I watched key movies of the cinema canon in
mostly degraded, duped and pirated prints
featuring insistent scratches, missing frames
and near-incoherent sound. Using today's cutting-edge remastering technology, many films,
even those from the early silent era, have been
restored to the luminosity of their original release. Decades of cinematic time have collapsed;
we now can see glorious restorations of movies
by the Lumières. The words " film history " have
JANUARY 2021 / 49

American Cinematographer - January 2021

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