The first were the Lumières: “Cinema is an invention without a future”; then Rossellini: “Cinema is dead”; and after them, one by one, came many others, in a succession of names and arguments utterly unlike one another. The history of cinema is punctuated by announcements that decree, in one way or another, in one form or another, its end. The end of what? Of many things, if one listens closely to what is being said. The end of cinema as an expressive form capable of evolving; the end of cinema as the foremost site for the elaboration of the image in the contemporary world; the end of cinema (and, in this case, of the movie theatre as well) as a central place in the shaping of the imaginary, of a passionate or critical gaze upon the world. And yet perhaps never as in recent years has the word “end” (bound up with cinema) come so often to the lips of theorists, critics, directors and insiders. And perhaps never as in recent years have we witnessed a broader and more widespread consumption of cinema, of images and fragments, of films and of discourses tied in some way to cinema.
Cinema is everywhere: in discourse as in the images that mark out contemporary existence, in the technological devices that accompany us, in the continuous flow of screens and images that redraw the topography of our landscapes. But it is a dissolved cinema, perhaps, scattered in the form of quotation, fragment, splinter, at times parody. For some, indeed, it is a cinema ever less able to preserve its ritual codes, the centrality of the theatre as the temple of a liturgy of spectacle, as collective viewing, capable of setting itself up as a common space, public and private at once. And yet never as in recent years have we witnessed such a multiplication of the spaces devoted to cinema: from the new festival forms that have literally blanketed whole territories with events, retrospectives, festivals and encounters, to the explosion of publications and online spaces devoted to cinema, official and otherwise (blogs, social networks, webzines, and so on), all the way to the exponential growth of cinema-related courses within academic spaces, universities and training schools. Is cinema finished? And yet every year sees a rise in the number of cinematic debuts, of semi-professional works, of attempts to give rise to a form of storytelling through the movement-image, even if only by means of the camera of a mobile phone. Is cinema finished? Or is it everywhere?
These are open questions, not easily given a definitive answer, and yet ones to which we must always return. Yes, because cinema is more and more a place of interrogation, a scattered place in which forms coexist that can hardly be assimilated to one another. This space can therefore become a constant occasion for questioning the forms, the tendencies, the transformations that cinema undergoes and sets in motion each time, working upon its own borders, upon its announced or presumed ends, upon its radical metamorphoses. At the same time, this space can become the occasion for questioning cinema anew, its forms and its history, tracing within it forgotten moments, scattered fragments, filmmakers fallen into oblivion. Once again, the aim is not to celebrate a “museum” history of cinema but, on the contrary, to reopen it, to show the connections between images regardless of the time in which they were created. A plurality of times that cross one another: this is the context of a column such as this one. Each time, a single itinerary may be an attempt at a partial answer to these manifold questions, a way of reflecting on a world (that of cinema, but not only) in continuous change, starting from the problematic announcement of its end (The End).
Where to begin? Perhaps precisely from the limit-forms that inhabit the most visible landscape of contemporary cinema. A first idea of cinema’s limit, of an end understood as the overcoming of the specific language of cinema, lies, from a theoretical point of view, in the fact that cinema must always have to do with a “real” on which it feeds, and which constitutes the starting point of every image. Cinema is an “imprint” of the real, claimed one of the most important theorists and critics of the second half of the last century, André Bazin (whose famous essay, Ontologia dell’immagine fotografica, is well worth rereading for its enduring relevance). Cinema, then, cannot but work upon bodies, upon places, upon the matter of the world, on pain of its own abstraction, of its no longer being able to be cinema. Hence the interdict that has always weighed upon animated cinema: is a form such as animation (such as contemporary animation, that is, understood as the total creation of a reality) to be regarded as a possibility of cinema or not, given that its narration rests on the creation ex novo of an imagined world rather than on its analogical reproduction? And yet never as today has the development of image-production technologies brought to the fore the problem of an artificially recreated image, founded on the principle that reality is not what unfolds before the eye of the camera but what can be simulated, wholly invented, simulated. A large part of contemporary cinema now works by assimilating the new technologies into itself, creating and constructing worlds and bodies that would otherwise not exist (from the impossible movements of the bodies in the Matrix trilogy, to the purely artificial existence of characters such as Ang Lee’s Hulk, all the way to the construction of an entire film through the technology of a computer-generated image – CGI – in Final Fantasy by Sakaguchi Hironobu).

Cinema, then, if we follow the Bazinian perspective, would seem to draw back before the massive and inexorable advance of a hybrid image, the menacing representation of an “end”, precisely, of cinema itself. Is this really so? Does the artificial image that constantly runs through cinematic forms decree, in apocalyptic tones, the exhaustion of Bazin’s vision? One might analyse the matter from another perspective, in which the new frontiers of animation and of an image that is no longer simply analogical but ever more insistently synthetic do not take shape as something wholly new on the present scene, but as a contemporary reworking of something that has always belonged to cinema itself, or rather to the images it produces. In a world of images that are ever more hybrid, ever more able to fuse together different forms and models, cinema seems to reactivate its own origins, to summon back an original power that for decades had seemed forgotten. At its birth, in fact, cinema did not tell stories, did not work with genres, did not construct images of male and female stars, did not revive the most ancient topoi of storytelling in ever-shifting and captivating forms; it was simply (and how much complexity there is in that “simply”) “wonder”, an occasion for astonishment before a world that simply opened up before the eyes of the new spectators, who saw it draw near, flickering, grey and spectral, but, in any case, in movement.
Cinema was, at its origin, a “cinema of attractions” (as André Goudreault explains, among others, in a recent essay of his, Cinema delle origini), a form that attracted (and frightened), that awakened the wonder and astonishment typical of childhood. It did not tell, but showed; it showed for the first time the world in movement, be it only through a mother nursing her child or a train pulling into a small provincial station. Reality, at the cinema, is immediately extraordinary, and the attraction of cinema consists in this too, in the great apparatus of spectacle that it sets in play. More than that. If reality is a source of wonder in the images of Lumière or Edison, it can be transfigured into a visionary and fantastical image that suddenly makes everything possible, as Méliès would then have it, making men, objects and animals appear and disappear, multiplying bodies and working upon dream, upon delirium and the most hallucinated fantasy. If Lumière, in Godard’s celebrated formulation, rediscovers the extraordinary within the ordinary, Méliès makes the extraordinary ordinary, the impossible possible. In both cases the spectator’s gaze is charged with wonder before the power of the new image.
A strange short circuit can thus be set off. Perhaps it is pointless to go on regarding the new hybrid images, the fruit of new technologies, as the irruption of something that wholly transforms cinema as we have known it until now. Perhaps it is pointless, because the new hybrid image is extraordinarily similar to the hybrid images of early cinema, to Méliès’s cinema-as-magic-spectacle, or even to the astonishment before the stirring of the leaves of a tree in some anonymous Lumière “view”. The force of the new forms of digital animation lies in their capacity to reactivate that original wonder (which, at bottom, has always belonged to cinema, as has its obsession with the real), to present themselves once again as though the show were ready to begin all over again.
A short circuit, then, that reveals one of the many connections internal to the history of cinema, a history that is anything but linear, anything but progressive, anything but concluded. To work on the end thus means to ask oneself, as was said at the outset, what it is that truly ends. And to ask about the possibility of starting over from the beginning. As we shall see from one instalment to the next. The End.

Daniele Dottorini teaches Fundamentals of Cinema at the University of Calabria. His publications include: Filmare dall’abisso. Il cinema di James Cameron, (Edizioni ETS, Pisa 2013), Jean Renoir. L’inquietudine del reale, (Ente dello spettacolo, Roma 2007), David Lynch. Il cinema del sentire, (Le Mani Editore, Recco, Genova, 2004).