Detail, Digression, Death: The Movies in Chris Petit’s Film Negative Space

Around 1995, I began to think about the impact that new technologies were having on the cinema of the past. In the first instance this past cinema was, for me, ‘the movies’ – the assorted collection of films, the Hollywood studio system…Around 1995, I began to think about the impact that new technologies were having on the cinema of the past. In the first instance this past cinema was, for me, ‘the movies’ – the assorted collection of films, the Hollywood studio system, particularly its final, post-war phase, Renoir, Rossellini and most of the Cahiers du Cinéma pantheon that had created the cinephile generation of the 1960s. For me ‘the movies’ are the films that taught me to love cinema. But that cinema, an emblem of modernity for more than half a century, had grown old already as its stars, directors and production systems retired, died and declined.