To begin with, this time we present three scenes, three stories centred on a movie theatre. First scene: Salvatore is a famous director. Many years ago he left his small town in Sicily, and now he has returned to it, to pay homage to his master, an old projectionist, and to witness the demolition of the old movie theatre where he saw the films that shaped him. The sky is overcast, the sun does not appear, the atmosphere is sombre, above all because of the indifference or resignation with which the demolition is met by the few onlookers who have turned up.
Second scene: a small, run-down Roman film club. Inside there are a few people, very few in truth; in fact, they are the young people who run the place. Disappointed by the poor turnout, they decide to reverse the perspective: if people will not go to the cinema, the cinema will come out of the theatre. With a Super 8 projector and an extension cord, the young cinephiles step out of the theatre and project onto the wall across from them (where the tables of a crowded open-air restaurant stand) the images of Rossellini's Stromboli, and in particular the close-ups of Ingrid Bergman; some diners protest, others look on with curiosity, while children shout with delight and wonder, playing and laughing before the enormous image of the actress's face.
Third scene: France, the Second World War. Adolf Hitler attends the premiere of a propaganda film in Paris. The news, though secret, spreads quickly: both the Allies and the young owner of the movie theatre decide to seize the chance to kill the dictator and so put an end to the war. The young woman wants revenge, and together with her lover she prepares a short film before setting fire to the cinema (thanks to the thousands of flammable reels stacked behind the screen). The film is an extreme close-up of the young woman announcing to the audience their imminent death. In the end everything comes crashing down: the auditorium begins to burn, the members of a commando unit begin to fire, a series of charges explode. Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and the members of the general staff are killed; the auditorium explodes, literally, into a thousand pieces.
Three stories alike only in appearance, brought together only because they recount the same event: the end (precisely) of cinema. As demolition in the first, as emptying-out in the second, and as explosion in the third. And yet.
And yet the difference is radical. In the three stories, in the three sequences – drawn respectively from Nuovo Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore, Nitrato d’argento by Marco Ferreri and Bastardi senza gloria by Quentin Tarantino – what is at stake is the very meaning of the word “end”, its broadest sense. Tornatore works on the idea that cinema was, throughout its history, a magical place of discovery and vision of a world of celluloid, and that the theatre was its place par excellence, the temple where the liturgy of cinema itself took place. The demolition of the movie theatre is the end of that familiar presence, of that everyday place where the subject discovers himself as a film spectator, as a lover of those images that flow endlessly across the screen. The image is veiled in nostalgia; that magical world no longer exists, because cinema as an experience, Tornatore tells us, is indissolubly bound to childhood, to the formation of the individual as a subject. More than that: in the demolition of the movie theatre before the astonished eyes of a few spectators lies the idea that not only is the consuming subject now someone else (the film spectator no longer exists), but also that that magical world has dissolved, that its images have changed place (which one? Or which ones?), that they no longer belong to the theatre/temple, which, like a deconsecrated church, has lost its meaning, its function, and has by now become useless.

Tornatore's nostalgic surrender is countered, however, by Ferreri, that brilliant imp and desecrator of humanist myths who, in his final film-testament, stages a counter-history of cinema on the side of the spectator, or better still, on the side of the movie theatre. In the film-club episode, the young regulars come to understand at a certain point that the theatre has lost its appeal, not so much as a magical-liturgical place but as a place where a collective consciousness is formed. In Ferreri there is no room for the nostalgia inherent in every “end”. On the contrary. The theatre's oblivion provokes a reaction, not a surrender; and the reaction consists precisely in the images spilling out, their proliferation beyond the walls. The (needless to say) extraordinary image of Ingrid Bergman's face in Stromboli is the image of a cinema (not of a theatre) that refuses to disappear, that still projects itself onto every possible surface, and that is still capable of creating meaning, of tracing out a world. There is no longer the grey wall of an open-air restaurant, but the unexpected event of an epiphany, endlessly repeatable and each time new, embodied in the images of Rossellini's masterpiece.
Here, then, is the first difference: what disappears, in Tornatore, is the idea of cinema as a magical place, fairy-tale-like, suspended. The idea of the “end” is here the idea of an inescapable oblivion, which can only be commemorated by a cinema that is by now posthumous, tied to the past, anchored to the obsession with nostalgia (not by chance, precisely what distinguishes Tornatore's stylistic signature). The end of cinema thus means that the images, now stripped of “aura”, can do nothing but celebrate themselves, their past, their ancient grandeur.
The end of a “sacred” place such as the movie theatre means instead, for Ferreri, a further possibility, a new life for images. What makes cinema a fundamental art form for the twentieth century is, for Ferreri, not its “aura” but, on the contrary, its being a form at once popular and utterly refined, provocative and irreverent, critical and forever “out of place”. The grotesque images of Ferreri's cinema are not meant to be consumed within a liturgy of the movie theatre as a, precisely, sacred place; rather, they are seen as images to come into contact with, to clash against, as something that, even if no longer destined for the collective experience of the theatre, can still strike the world, act upon it, make itself present to it.

It is broadly along this line that the third scene we evoked above belongs. Tarantino has always “played” with cinema, with beloved images endlessly reconjured. He does so in Bastardi senza gloria too, but adding something worth dwelling on. The Tarantinian scene radically changes the terms of the game. There is no room here for Tornatore's nostalgia, nor for the provocative double life of images staged by Ferreri (even while presupposing them both). Tarantino does not proclaim the end of the sacred rite of the movie theatre; rather, he reveals its utopian side through another ritual gesture, that of sacrifice, of self-destruction. The auditorium of the small cinema run by the young Jewish woman Shoshana, who years earlier escaped the slaughter of her family, becomes the place where all the film's destructive dynamics converge – Shoshana herself, ready to sacrifice herself and her cinema in order to avenge the horrors she has suffered; the group of “bastardi”, who have planned the destruction of the cinema in order to kill Hitler and his general staff and so put an end to the war; Colonel Landa himself, the SS officer ready to betray in order to secure himself a safe future once the conflict is over – and it becomes the place where, in the end, we witness a kind of posthumous life of images or, better still, a posthumous life of two bodies: that of the German soldier who plays himself in the propaganda film projected inside the cinema, and that of Shoshana, whose face appears on the screen before the spectators, announcing their imminent death. The images of the two bodies keep running across the screen, automatically, even though the two characters lie dead in the projection booth.
And it is at this point that History (with a capital H) undergoes a significant variation; what never happened comes to pass: Hitler and all the top hierarchs of Nazism die in the explosion of the movie theatre, or gunned down by the machine-gun fire of the “bastardi” who have infiltrated the auditorium. History is entirely rewritten from cinema (or within cinema), which thus reveals, in the fiction of the tale, its utopian scope (and, in this case, its dystopian scope as well). Tarantino's nihilistic gaze, from this point of view, proposes a wholly personal solution to the excruciating dilemma that runs through an extraordinary and “final” work such as Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinèma, whose underlying question, running beneath its almost four hours of images, is: “Why did cinema, this powerful apparatus of the imaginary, this instrument capable of creating other worlds and another gaze upon reality, not save us from the horrors of the short century?”. If the Godardian question casts a patina of melancholy over the entire history of twentieth-century cinema, Tarantino, irreverent, offers an answer. Cinema can set itself up as a redemptive apparatus by renouncing its liturgical and sacral dimension, centred on the rite of the movie theatre, the dimension that shaped its history throughout the twentieth century. For the celebration of the rite, the American director substitutes the savage enjoyment of images, which alone are thereby able to reread History, to stand always and in any case as forms of narration, even counterfactual ones. To the unity of the cinema “body”, experienced as a collective ritual, Bastardi senza gloria opposes the ferocious multiplication of images, which are no longer Tornatore's dream-images, nor the icons narrated by Ferreri (the close-up of Ingrid Bergman), but are by now free images, “senza gloria”, beyond control.
It is also in this way that cinema, as things stand today, rethinks its own 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).