For eighty years, from Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915 to The Matrix in 1999, cinema was the supreme cultural form of Western modernity: a visionary recital which expressed the highest creative powers of humanity. What “the most excellent painters and sculptors and architects” were for Renaissance, film directors were for the American century, with Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael reborn as Kubrick, Kurosawa and Tarkovsky. But America has been dying for decades and cinema is now the death mask of its intentions.
Everywhere cinema sighs with exhaustion. The box office is dominated by sequels and comic books and corporate state propaganda. Movies based on children’s toys are treated as serious art works. The biggest star in the world is the 61 year old Tom Cruise — and none of this has any impact whatsoever. “Apparently for Netflix,” Quentin Tarantino observed recently, “Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie and $50 million on the next movie for them. I don’t know what any of those movies are. I’ve never seen them. Have you? Good for him that he’s making so much money. But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t even exist.”
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