Fellini, Scorsese and the end of cinema
Martin Scorsese has recently published an article about Fellini at Harper's magazine, but which also discusses a bit the current sad state of cinema. Today, he says, everything has become merely indistinct "content", and the magic of cinema and its artistic auteurs has been lost. I tend to agree. When I was a teenager, I used to go to the now defunct street cinemas, or to specialized art cinemas, to watch films by Fellini, Truffaut, Renoir. Granted, in the 80s and 90s this was already a culture in extinction, much farther from the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s that Scorsese mentions, but there were still a few remains of that era. Then the local cinemas were replaced by the multiplexes, which would show mostly super-hero movies or other blockbusters. Auteur or art cinema became an even smaller niche. And then cinema was replaced by television and streaming. Going to the cinema is a social experience, closer to going to the theatre or to church; watching a film on tel
