Film for the Future

Abstract

Film for the Future Michelle Baroody (bio) and Maggie Hennefeld (bio) Lovers of film all know it as "an invention without a future," to quote the notorious, alleged proclamation by Louis Lumière in 1895.1 The medium has since survived its initial obsolescence, the insistent rise of a slew of rival technologies (television, video, internet streaming, etc.), multiple global pandemics, and the ongoing destruction of its volatile archives, among other existential catastrophes. Yet, despite film's resilient object lessons for futurity, the Covid-19 pandemic has somehow felt different: a final nail in the coffin? With the indefinite closure of movie theaters, cancelation of international festivals, and hemorrhaging revenue losses across the global industry, film's elasticity has at last reached its breaking point. Or has it? Despite the recession of collective viewing experiences, innovative new experiments proliferate in the pandemic's wake, emphasizing the virtues of virtual curation, the digitization of obscure and overlooked archives, and increasing accessibility of on-site events (such as special screenings, festivals, and panels) for spectators worldwide. These hopeful turns are exemplified by Another Screen: the "free streaming project by Another Gaze journal, created to foreground rare film work we deem worthy of feminist interrogation, across geographies and modes of production."2 Another Screen's collaborative programs spotlight the politics of feminist film collectivity, such as: "For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women," "Hands Tied / Eating the Other," and "[Silence] […] [Laughter]," all curated with historical context, multilingual translations, and critical feminist essays.3 Shasha Movies launched globally in 2021; it is the first virtual platform dedicated to streaming films by and for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) [End Page 139] makers and audiences, conjuring the power and reach of virtual programming toward transformative feminist ends.4 This unprecedented service realizes the open-access objectives of Habibi Collective, Shasha's organizers, an online archive founded in 2018 that is committed to elevating the voices of women and nonbinary SWANA artists and making film accessible to those who might not see these works otherwise. If the canon has too long been dominated by white, male, cishet auteurs and their on-again/off-again relationship with big Hollywood industry, the death of film has created space for collective voices, different perspectives, wayward formats, greater accessibility, and activist mobilizations. This is the story of the future of film, which is mischievously unfolding before our very eyes. Ends of Film? Film has spectacularly outlasted its own death more times than Wyle E. Coyote fatally nosedived off a cliff or survived his accidental self-immolation—which is not bad for a medium that cut its teeth on the morbid reanimation of irretrievable pastness and loss. "By the time you read this, cinema will have died," remarks Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece in her evocative introduction to the timely (too timely) 2020 edited volume, Ends of Cinema, "because cinema has ended many, many times and will surely end again in the near future."5 We opt for the term "film" over "cinema," not to split hairs about signifiers but to stir trouble through recourse to the medium's material base, which has been all but eclipsed by digital streaming during the pandemic. Though the ends of film (much like the pandemic) may feel endless, if nothing else, its prolonged finality has been deeply generative for film and media scholars, who have ragpicked at the ruins of the medium and its unruly social potentials across a vast range of locations, histories, practices, and contexts. What qualities are inflexibly essential to film? Its impression of reality, the collective projection of still-moving images onto a blank screen, and its celluloid base number among the many conventions threatened by our current conjuncture of home viewing and multimedia convergence. Recent film books theorize toward the friction between what cinema is/has been and what it irreversibly will have become. Shane Denson's Discorrelated Images (2020), James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati's Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (2020), and Caetlin Benson-Allott's The Stuffof Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (2021) all pose versions of this chameleonic ontological question: not what is film (to invoke André Bazin's...