The End of Cinema – A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age

Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 4.

Andrew, What Cinema Is!, xii–xiv.

Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 56n. 32. Note that the English translator of Morin’s book (The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer [2005 (1956)]) has chosen to use the terms Cinematograph, cinematography, and cinematographic, thereby risking confusion with quite different contemporary meanings, in the latter two cases, and with the Lumière Cinématographe alone in the other. By choosing to use kinematograph, we and our translator believe we have sidestepped these problems by using a widespread period term in English no longer in general use to suggest a more general phenomenon.

Even though it is true, as Jean-Jacques Meusy reports, that fairground cinema would survive, in France at least, with a degree of vigor until the war. See his volume Cinémas de France 1894–1918: Une histoire en images (2009).

“Surdiffusion” in the French. See Laurent Le Forestier, Aux Sources de l’industrie du cinéma: Le modèle Pathé 1905–1908 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). Le Forestier’s volume is a direct and well-documented discussion of most aspects of the 1907–1908 crisis, and we refer the reader to his work.

François Valleiry, “La nouvelle pellicule,” Phono-Ciné-Gazette 46 (February 15, 1907): 70. Note that Valleiry wrote on the subject again a few months later in an article squarely entitled “Le Cinématographe n’est pas encore né” (“The Kinematograph Is Not Yet Born,” Phono-Ciné-Gazette 55 (July 1, 1907): 250. The authors thank Valentine Robert of the Université de Lausanne for bringing Valleiry’s articles to their attention.

According to Richard Abel, “François Valleiry” was a pseudonym of Edmond Benoît-Lévy, founder and editor of the very influential trade journal Phono-Ciné-Gazette. Abel indicates in footnote that “Benoît-Lévy apparently also wrote under the pseudonym of François Valleiry.” Richard Abel, “Booming the Film Business,” in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (1996), 123.

We might say that Bazin’s famous saying, “Cinema has not yet been invented!” is a late echo of Valleiry’s “The kinematograph has not yet been born”!

Valleiry, “Le Cinématographe n’est pas encore né,” 250. Our emphasis.

Ibid. Our emphasis.

Gérard Lefort, “Révolutions,” Libération, Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 2. Note that the editorial is reproduced in its entirety here.

To administer digitalis in a dosage sufficient to achieve the maximum therapeutic effect without producing toxic symptoms.