This article was written by Eoin O’Faolain.
Concluding our look back on the last decade, Screenhead examines the major movie events of the year 2009, and ponders on what the future holds for cinema.
“The global crisis that is concluding this decade may have been predicted by experts in 2006, but it was beginning to be noticed by the public in 2008, and by the turn of this decade’s last year, worldwide recession, debt, and cutbacks were in every home, on every media in every country. We were officially in comedown, with banks and banking institutes collapsing like houses of cards.
Hollywood braced itself. It started to make redundancies based on fears that abundant pay cuts would mean less disposable income to spend on things like cinema tickets and DVDs. But oh how wrong they were. By the end of the year, 2009 will have earned far more box office moolah than any other year, despite all the gloom and doom, beating the record set in 2007.
Why? Because people still need entertainment. They may even need it more now than ever. And film offers a 2-3 hour break from the anxiety of reality, an escape into another world. And despite what many say about the death of cinema in an age of LCD screens and HD formats, going to the movie theatre is a social aspect, a way of getting out of the confines of the home (which may indeed represent financial anxiety) and connecting with other people. It’s this shared experience that home video can never replace.”
Read this article from Screenhead.
The Ten Commandments of Filmmaking
How to Work (and Survive) in the
Film and Television Industry
by Peter D. Marshall
