Sørenssen, Bjørn. “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant-Garde in Documentary Realized?” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008): 47–59. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Sept. 2013.

…with the development of 16mm and television, the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector, will go to the local bookstore and hire films written on any subject, of any form, from literary criticism and novels to mathematics, history, and general science. From that moment on, it will no longer be possible to speak of the cinema. There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures, for the cinema, like literature, is not so much a particular art as a language which can express any sphere of thought.

(Astruc in Graham 1968: 19)

Being very interested in technology myself, I find it almost amazing how accurate Astruc’s prediction was. It’s as if I said “In 10 years, we will have microwaves that make food appear” (although I’m no specialist in microwaves) and not just to the point where we can hire movies like books from a library, the fact that cinema has reached a point where you can find a movie about anything, it’s not just limited to holywood movies anymore.

That said, I have a very split opinion on this.

The accessibility of movies has gone far beyond having to go to a cinema or even renting a dvd at any type of store, we now have access to films many more convenient ways. We can rent our movies off the internet, watch them on our portable supercomputer (smartphone) and even through rectangular black boxes hooked up to our TV made initially to play videogames on. Personally I love it, on a wet winter day I don’t even have to go out anymore, I have access to everything at arm’s reach. The negative side of this is that I believe more and more movies are being made purely for profits with no real story just a catchy title, interesting movie trailer and a million dollar advertising campaign.

Throughout the article Bjørn Sørenssen quotes and writes about how movie making equipment is reaching a stage where anyone can make a movie, from high en smartphones to decent camera’s most of us have good quality filming equipment at reach, and the same goes for distribution. I could make a movie and post it up on internet. But I am yet to see a cinema standard movie made by someone like me and you. There are many home made movies on the web, unfortunately none of which I have thought to myself “I should watch this on a larger screen, and maybe get some popcorn”.

So what’s missing? Better Acting, Filming, Script