A few weeks ago I travelled to a college on Long Island to give a lecture — in other words, to stand up in front of a room full of people, ramble for a few minutes about movies and movie criticism, and then spend the rest of the hour answering questions. It was the middle of the day, and the audience was composed, in what looked like roughly equal numbers, of undergraduates and older students enrolled in continuing education courses. Half of the people were 25 and under, the other half 65 and over, leaving me smack in the generational middle and, as it happened, bouncing vertiginously, from one question to the next, between the future and the past.

Will 3D last? What will be the next global cinematic hot spot? What young stars will still be around 10 or 20 years from now? Hard questions to answer, since a critic’s job is not prophecy so much as the anticipation of surprise. But the other type of question — which did not always come from the elders in the crowd — was not surprising at all. Why aren’t there any good movies anymore?

It does no good to respond that, actually, there are. Providing evidence to back up that assertion — what about Margin Call? Moneyball? Mysteries of Lisbon? — is equally fruitless, since the question is not really a question at all, but rather a general complaint. It is widely assumed, almost to the extent of being conventional wisdom, that movies have suffered an overall decline in quality and that the exceptions are outliers, holdovers or happy accidents.

The past is full of glories, whether black-and-white jewels of the old studio system (Casablanca and All About Eve come up a lot), imported treasures from the 1960s (Antonioni! Godard!) or rough diamonds from the brief splendour of the New Hollywood in the ’70s. Whatever your preferred golden age, one thing is certain: They just don’t make them like they used to.

the celluloid dream

The machinery of production and distribution is in the midst of an epochal change. If you go to a movie theatre, you are less and less likely to see a film in the traditional, literal sense. Cans and reels have been replaced by hard drives and digital files, and some of the old material hallmarks of cinema — the grainy swirl of emulsion as the light passes through the stock, the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector — are quickly taking on an aura of antiquity. Movies are shot and shown digitally and increasingly distributed that way as well, streaming onto the screen in your living room or in your hand.

These changes inspire enthusiasm, bewilderment and also a measure of mourning. In a recent review of Tower Heist and Melancholia — a pairing that might at once confirm and refute the gloom of backward-looking cinephiles — Anthony Lane of The New Yorker laments the impending eclipse of movie-going, a collective ritual ostensibly threatened by the ascendance of home viewing.

Around the same time, a headline on Roger Ebert’s blog announced “The Sudden Death of Film.” In the essay that follows, Ebert’s grief is tempered with resignation: “The celluloid dream may live on in my hopes, but video commands the field.” Ebert, who has frequently (and eloquently) argued for the aesthetic superiority of film over video, acknowledges that “my war is over, my side lost, and it’s important to consider this in the real world.” And he concludes with a wry elegy for the typewriter, a machine that has become, along with the movie projector and the turntable, a fetish and an emblem of superannuated modernity.

Ebert is generally immune to the golden-ageism that has become a critical default position; he embraces the old and the new with equal ardour. But the sense of loss he expresses in the face of changing technology resonates with the gloom I encountered on Long Island. It can be hard to escape, and even harder to argue against, the feeling that something we used to love is going away, or already gone. This is less a critical position or a historical insight than a mood, induced by the usual selective comparisons and subjective hunches. Back then (whenever it was) the stars were more glamorous, the writing sharper, the stories more cogent and the critics more powerful.

new versus old

Are movies essentially a thing of the past? Does whatever we have now, digital or analog, represent at best a pale shadow of bygone glory? The transition from analog to digital technology has the somewhat paradoxical effect of making those monuments more numerous and imposing. As a platform for criticism, the Internet lends itself to the endless making and circulation of lists, and it has also become a gathering place for cinematic antiquarians of all stripes and sensibilities. At the same time, the history of film is now more widely and readily accessible than ever before. We may lament the end of movie clubs and campus film societies that presented battered prints of great movies, but by any aesthetic (as opposed to sentimental) standard, the high-quality, carefully restored digital transfers of classics and curiosities now available on DVD and Blu-ray offer a much better way to encounter the canon.

But the very proximity of this canon contributes to the devaluation of the present. Those Criterion Collection and Warner Bros boxes — of Ozu and Rossellini, of westerns and film noir and avant-garde cinema — gaze reproachfully from the shelves, much as the Turner Classic Movies titles lurk in the conscience of the DVR, silently scolding viewers who just want to catch up on Modern Family or Bored to Death. Shouldn’t we be giving our attention to movies that have proved themselves, over the years, worthy of it?

By all means. The alternative is an uncritical embrace of the new for its own sake, a shallow contempt for tradition and a blindness to its beauties. But there is at least an equal risk of being blinded by those beauties to the energies that surround us, and to mistake affection for a standard of judgement.

Of course no modern movie star can match Humphrey Bogart’s world-weary toughness or Bette Davis’s sparkling wit, and of course nothing in today’s movies looks or sounds the way it used to. But why — or how — should it? Every art form changes, often at rates and in ways that cause discomfort to its devotees. But the arts also have a remarkable ability to withstand and absorb those changes, and to prove wrong the prophecies of their demise.

And yet movies, at the moment, feel especially fragile and perishable. That may be because film is so much younger than the other great art forms, which have had centuries to wane, wax, mutate and cross-pollinate.

Nostalgia, in other words, is built into movie-going, which is why movie-going itself has been, almost from the beginning, the object of nostalgia. It hardly seems like an accident that so many movies embrace this bitter-sweet disposition.

The birth of the talkies, it goes without saying, represents the first death of cinema. The movies survived sound, just as they survived television, the VCR and every other terminal diagnosis. And they will survive the current upheavals as well. How can I be sure? Because 10, 20, or 50 years from now someone will certainly be complaining that they don’t make them like they used to. Which is to say, like they do right now.