CINEMA is floundering and risks losing touch with a new generation of digitally literate viewers and film-makers, one of Britain’s leading directors said yesterday.

Anthony Minghella told The Times that the medium is in the midst of a convulsion that will change what we watch as dramatically as the invention of the printing press revolutionised literature. He believes that an increased familiarity with making and watching moving images on the internet, mobile phones and cheap digital cameras is making viewers increasingly critical of the type of films emerging from Hollywood.

Professional film-makers face irrelevance if they cannot find a way to respond to these more “film literate” audiences, the director of The English Patient and Cold Mountain added.

Cinema box-office takings in 2005 fell for the first time since 1991 and only 12 films this year have made more than $100 million (£53 million) in the US, compared with 21 in the first ten months of 2003.

Background

• Breaking and Entering

• Breaking and Entering - Sunday Times review

• Minghella's democratic vision of cinema, but not as we know it

Sultry prima donna

Juliette Binoche does sex scenes only if it’s necessary. This time she says it is

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

The phenomenal growth of YouTube, the video-sharing website bought by Google this month for $1.65 billion, proves that the desire to see and make films is at its strongest yet.

Minghella, who is the chairman of the British Film Institute, described YouTube as one of several giant leaps in the technology for creating, distributing and watching films that have blown away barriers to mass participation in filmmaking.

Just as the invention of the printing press democratised the written word by creating “more critics”, so a generation steeped in the literacy of the moving image will challenge assumptions that have underpinned film for more than a century, he predicted. “The medium is floundering,” he added.

He suspects that the appetite for the “astonishing and pyrotechnic images” suited to a big screen will remain. The power of stars to entrance the public will also endure.

Minghella cites Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a kaleidoscopic romantic comedy, as the most encouraging recent indicator of where mainstream films could go. “It’s like a dream and reminds us that narrative cinema is not essential for the movies. “In many ways narrative cinema was an eccentric option. The nature of film is to make connections you couldn’t make in life.”

The changes in the film industry will prove as significant as the invention of montage (picture editing), the introduction of sound and the arrival of television were in the past century, Minghella said. “It’s a revolution. But we don’t quite know today what the impact is going to be, any more than with the invention of the printing press or the Biro. It’s got nothing to do with quality. It’s to do with quantity and access.

“The ownership of moving images has passed into the hands of practically everybody and the articulation of moving images has passed into the hands of everybody with access to a phone, laptop or digital camera. They can now have their say.”

Minghella’s latest film Breaking and Entering premiered at The Times BFI London Film Festival last night (see review).

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(including four pre-release titles) 8.30pm To book tickets call the festival box office on 020-7928 3232, visit the websites at www.lff.org.uk or timesonline.co.uk/lff or go to the venues At the Times website you can read reviews, watch videos, view our red-carpet gallery, and read the full guide to the festival

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