Why is Film Dead?

“The whole dimension of everyday life with its infinitesimal movements and its multitude of transitory actions could be disclosed nowhere but on the screen.” -Siegfried Kracauer

It’s often said that film is dead. No great (or even good) movies are made anymore. It’s all just comic book movies and sequels and blah blah blah. This is true enough. It’s also often said that decades are indistinct now. That 2009 and 2019 don’t really look or feel different, in the way that 1969 and 1979 did. The 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s all had a distinct quality to them—if you hear a song, watch a movie, or see a photograph from one of those decades, you’ll probably know right away which decade it is. But good luck doing that with the 2000s or 2010s. Same with the 2020s. Decades now don’t look or feel like anything special.

Movies also stopped having the cultural and artistic power that they used to have right around the 2000s. Movies reached their peak in the 1970s—the golden age of cinema—but were also massive in the 1980s, if more mass appeal and less artistic than in the 1970s. In the 1990s a kind of synthesis was achieved—big mass appeal movies but also movies with artistic value. And there were so many popular genres in the 1990s! All kinds of movies were made—big blockbusters (and they were actually good back then, like Jurassic Park); psychological thrillers (like Se7en and Fight Club and a lot more); psychosexual thrillers (anything Rebecca De Mornay was in); legal thrillers (Ashley Judd made a bunch of good ones); comedies (Jim Carrey and Robin Williams made a ton of good ones). Now those genres don’t really exist (blockbusters do, but they aren’t nearly as good as something like Jurassic Park). Are there psychological thrillers anymore? Are there even big comedies anymore? Not really. Who are the big comedy stars now? They’re all from like 15 years ago. Jim Carrey has retired from acting, and Robin Williams killed himself.

It seems to me that these two things—the death of film and the end of decades being distinct—happened at the same time. And it goes back to the quote from film theorist Siegfried Kracauer that I put at the top of this essay—the “whole dimension of everyday life” can be disclosed or depicted only on the screen; that is, only in films. Film (and photography, which is what film is, just a bunch of photographs strung together and set into motion) is, as Kracauer often said, “the only art which leaves its raw material more or less intact.” Every other art form transforms its raw materials into something else—photographs just represent their material, daily life. The raw material of film/photography is life itself—and you see that on the screen.

This is what I like most about watching movies—you get a sense of what life was like during a certain time. I love movies from the 1970s and 1990s for this reason—because life, the world, and people were so full of life and spirit back then. Culture was so vibrant that it just oozes all over the screen. The way people talked, the way they dressed, the way they moved—everything about it was alive and tells you so much about what life used to be like.

Movies are the best time capsules that have ever existed. Watching a movie like Midnight Cowboy (1969) gives you such a strong feeling for what life was like in New York City in the late 1960s. That’s another thing—movies not only used to communicate what a time was like, but what places were like. Now it feels like every place is kind of the same. Places don’t really exist anymore—now it’s just corporatized spaces where people are hunched over their phones. So now there’s no real time anymore and no real places. Everything for the last like 20 years has been one long moment in one homogenous space that looks and feels like nothing. No wonder film is dead—it is meant to capture time and place, but there is no time and place left to capture, so it has no more function.

Imagine someone in the future looking back at movies made in like 2021—they won’t get a sense of what people were like, or of what the world was like. If they do, it will be a strictly negative one. They will get no feel for what people loved, what they felt, how they lived—because people don’t love, feel, or live anymore. This is ultimately what every movie made today tells you—that the human spirit is dead. Movies now are just depictions of the rotting carcass of what used to be called the human spirit.

Since there is no more time or place left for film to reveal and capture, it makes sense that film has been totally taken over by the profit motive. Profit-seeking is the one thing that is still very much alive—and getting more alive by the day!—so this is what film serves now. Film does not contain the “whole dimension of everyday life with its infinitesimal movements and its multitude of transitory actions…” that Siegfried Kracauer thought film could disclose. Everyday life has no dimension anymore—it has no little movements or transitory actions. Nothing moves. Everyone is locked down, sunken in, scared, hopeless, isolated. There’s no life to depict, and nothing has survived that can live on the screen. But we still have films—even though the kind of life that films were invented to depict do not exist anymore—because it is a useful way for profits to be made. You can’t learn anything about the human spirit from films anymore—because the human spirit does not exist now—but you can learn about money.

Movies today are also all about plot, story, narrative, and so on. There’s no room in them to give you a sense of time or place. There is a place for story within film/photography, but it should be what Kracauer calls “found stories.” Film should have stories that emerge from the time and place they are depicting, or from the character and even the style or atmosphere on screen. Story should be incidental to these other elements, not the focus. Story should be “found” within these other things, not imposed on them. But today, since time, place, style, atmosphere, and so on are all gone and dead, “story” is forced on film, as the sole reason they exist now. Movies now are just about plot and exposition. But a film that is just about plot is the worst kind of film—rather, a story should emerge from among everything else that a film can do. It can be part of it, but it shouldn’t be the focus. As film has died, story has become the entirety of what film is about.