Cinema and demography

Abstract

In a short contribution to Libération in 1988, Serge Daney suggests that ‘the science that ought to be applied to cinema today is no longer psychoanalysis or semiotics but the study of movie-populations’. ‘What's needed’, Daney claims, ‘is a demography of film beings’.1 He goes on to outline a reconception of the history and hermeneutics of cinema built around the relation between a cinema population (the filmgoing audience) and a screen population (the population of actors appearing on screen). The cine-demography (ciné-démographie) that Daney proposes as a way of assessing the state of cinema in the twilight of the twentieth century would conjugate these two populations along their halting, shifting, waxing and waning relation to each other over time. In a reversal of DeMille's dream that one day there would be as many people on the screen as were present in the bustling cinemas of his time, Daney argues that over the course of the mid-century it was in fact a dwindling of both these populations that had taken place: the history of cinema can very easily be told through this isomorphism of entrances (into the auditorium and into the frame). We know that from the middle of the century (post-war, television), fewer and fewer people in already too many movie theatres saw films with fewer and fewer people in them. This slimmed down spectacle has been called modern cinema. And the story of L'Avventura tells nothing else but this symptomatic minor event: from a small group of characters, one quite simply disappears.2