This, at least, is what we believe, although we have not yet verified it. We have found one counter example (“The ‘cinéma’ . . . is dead. What happened to it?”) in a book by Roger Boussinot (Le cinéma est mort. Vive le cinéma! [Paris: Denoël, 1967], p. 44) and another, in which the expression “the cinema” as a whole appears between scare quotes, in the work of André Bazin (“Perhaps ‘the cinema’ was in fact only a stage in the vast evolution of the means of mechanical reproduction”), in “Le cinéma est-il mortel?,” L’Observateur politique, économique et littéraire 170 (13 August 1953): 24 (reprinted in Trafic 50 [summer 2004]: 246-60).