I won’t say much about it because it’s a pretty thorough exploration in itself, but if anyone is still interested in cinephilia and it’s demise, I highly recommend watching this Steve Shives video. While to be fair Shives covers a lot of the ground many academic writers have been going over recently, he lays out a pretty decent summation of why cinemas – referred to by him as movie theatres – have lost their appeal. Basically, it boils down to a question of, why go out to a cinema when you can watch any film you want at a click of a mouse? Yet Shives also points out that cinemas will always have a romance to them. While accessing films might be easier than ever, there will always be an attraction to actually going out, physically entering a screening room, sitting down among hundreds of other people as the lights go down and watching a film on the big screen. What he says thus has strong overtones of Andre Bazin, although Shives does not mention the father of cinephilia.

Yet I certainly agree that watching a film at a cinema will always be different: even as someone for whom going out to a cinema is especially difficult, I’ll always relish going out to watch the latest Bond or Star Trek film. Where watching a film on my computer can be something casual which I can take or leave on the spur of a moment, going to watch a film in a cinema, even one just a twenty minute powerchair ride away, is something which requires intent, purpose, and is something to be relished. Thus I seriously doubt that, even with so many people predicting their imminent demise both online and off, physical cinemas will ever lose their place in contemporary culture.