Cinema has risen in a book

Crisis, death, disappearance, collapse. If then there are the halls in the middle: “Unstoppable bleeding”. These are always the watchwords that sooner or later pop up when it comes to cinema, especially here. And cinema, of course, gets boring even before going there. If nothing else it is stream he doesn’t carry this whine around, and who knows why the public, frighteningly, seems to prefer the sofa at home to the “magic of the big screen”. However, a “Top Gun” every now and then, done as it used to be done, Tom Cruise’s smile included, is enough to resume the interrupted conversation. The desire for cinema is there, it’s the beautiful films that are missing. If the theater dies, the cinema in fact coexists very well with its disappearance more or less forever (the first to declare it dead, just shortly after inventing it, were the Lumières as is well known). Up to a certain point, then, this unexpected revival of the film book is surprising, a fetish-object of the twentieth-century cinephile, an old tool of cultural essay writing, very out of fashion in the age of TikTok and in a country where few books are read and essays still less. Seventies cinephiles will remember the austere volumes of the “Castoro Cinema” series, the black cover with the stylized silhouette of the directors in the background. Small battle monographs on sacred monsters in the history of cinema edited by famous critics (there were Farassino on Godard, Guido Fink on Lubitsch, Enrico Ghezzi on Stanley Kubrick). They began to disappear in the late 1990s. Then everything was swallowed up by the internet. What is the point, after all, of a film book in an era in which the lives of directors and actors are peeked on Wikipedia, and making-of hey backstage and Netflix tells us the daring stories of how certain films are born better than anyone else (see the series “The Movies that Made Us”, now in its third season). By buying Kent Jones’ documentary film on Truffaut’s interview with Hitchcock a few years ago, Netflix has also transformed into streaming one of the three or four cinema books that are worth reading in life.