[As this is a new project distinct from Socialism and/or Barbarism, this approximates a starting point.  A number of the issues worked through at S a/o B in the last couple years will continue here.  The scope, however, will be more restricted and directly linked to cultural forms, above all to film.]

It is often said that cinema is dead.

Or dying, or deserves to be.  Or that it doesn’t deserve to be, so its twilight is sad, but it had a good run, so it goes.  That, given the quadruple salvo of television, the internet, video games, and the general worsening of the public sphere, that diffuse, heterogeneous, and sprawling thing called the cinema– and the act of going to it – has been long on the way out.

Or, at the very least, that it is in crisis, and it will mutate, splitting itself into even further irreconcilable tendencies.  A fair speculation on those might include: big-budget films learning to directly probe and provoke neuorological response (in a dark mirror of Eisenstein’s dream of montage that could produce direct and measurable physiological effects); smaller-budget pseudo-independent films aping that tendency, at least in the look and rhythm of it, to prove that you can do it on your own and therefore strengthening the aesthetic dominance of the very thing they pettily claim to critique; old-fashioned prestige films drawing on twinkling nostalgia for the long far-gone (already in play from fake grindhouse films through The Artist, Super 8, and et-bloody-cetera; just wait for the early ’90s nostalgic reload, in which the look and lingo of Hackers is meticulously recreated); a proliferation of genuinely oddball cheap things, that look good and cut strangely in a way that can’t be reduced to an object lesson in imitation; ever-increasing archives of documentary material, quickly collected and made available by necessary groups like Mosireen and put to the best possible use; national cinemas that have never particularly aligned with the style, patterns, or concerns of Hollywood narrative and hence follow their own tracks, producing material that will be retroactively cannibalized (primarily in remakes) by the industrial film centers with enough profits to weather the coming decades of riotous entropy; and, above all, a endlessly unfurling swath of more of the same old shit.

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