They declared Méliès dead. He called cut.

In the beginning was cinema, writing, and innovation. The idea of writing—graphing—with movement: cine. Or rather, of writing movement itself. That now-forgotten phrase, motion pictures, was the last witness of a childlike collective thrill that for us has become more ordinary than breathing.

There’s something profoundly human about the cinematic medium—though we’ll have to agree on what cinematic medium truly means. Our thinking is cinematic in every way. Visually, it manifests as a combination of more or less uninflected images, rarely blessed with meaning when taken as discrete units, isolated from the sequence that gives them reason to exist. And narratively, it mirrors events, fragments, explosions—perhaps even beautiful ones—which make, produce sense only as part of a whole that, mind you, doesn’t possess a meaning of its own. It catalyzes in the viewer the formation of what we might call a plot or a message, depending on our perceptive setup, cultural lens, and even political opinions.

Hitchcock, who knew a thing or two about this, mastered it: the audience must be given all—and only—the information necessary to understand. Where understanding means to synthesize, each within themselves, a story. All, and only! Because in cinema there is no superfluous: there’s what works and what doesn’t. What’s useful and what’s harmful. The good and the bad—sorry, defenders of some improbable visual literature.

The Americans got this from the start. Instead of the sterile film, they chose the more communicative movies. Because it’s about moving images—and the obvious is not always trivial.

We contemporaries are so aware of the infinite declinations of this medium that we don’t even notice them. Stopping to reflect on it would be like pondering the difference between a novel by Umberto Eco, one by Dan Brown, an article from the New York Times, a blog post, the copywriting of a dropshipping course and a thermodynamics manual. Speculative, self-reflective. Boring.

The State cares deeply about teaching us what to think of the writers it deems worthy of study, but thankfully, it doesn’t do the same with images. Too simple, too entertaining: undeserving of that tedious aura that makes us feel cultured. We all know how it goes—today’s youth with YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok even make television look virtuous. That kind of levity is too guiltless, so it gets filed among those openly secret practices—things that don’t need hiding, but that you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about. Moms don’t give blowjobs, professors don’t get high, and intellectuals don’t indulge in entertainment.

Lacking an institutional definition of cinema, we’ve fought over two paradigms. The American one, born of a population’s simplicity that can be either feather or iron—and in the case of cinema, it’s feather, with all its seductive erotic applications. And the European one, of a smug complexity often made of an iron too rigid to keep the excitement alive. Cinema is Art, we’ve told ourselves—it’s critique, it’s conscience. We even got to see it as the creative output of a demiurge-director capable of using, imagine this, the camera like a stylo pen. Poor editors, cinematographers, set designers, craftsmen, and runners: they think they exist, while Uncle Jean-Luc has declared that no, darlings, he alone exists. But hey, Godard said so—an intellectual, a beacon of civilization. Not some George Lucas who, in his pitiful life, did nothing more than bring billions of people to theaters.

The truth is neither side is right. Don’t worry—I gave myself the rhetorical slap in the neck for today’s dose.

There is no right statute for cinema because cinema is already the statute of something else. Or better: it’s a macro-category of statutes. It contains many things: commercial American cinema, European auteur cinema, global experimental cinema, amateur cinema, activist cinema… all of which, in turn, contain even more things. It’s a vast, fractal system that keeps even the most self-important academics busy—those who believe their Word creates all these expressive forms and that the production system is merely a contractor building their pre-existing, immutable, eternal categories.

Do you really think Spielberg and Moretti do the same job? Think of how many ways there are to be, say, a medical doctor. Is a plastic surgeon a colleague of an immunologist? Careful now—my family roots compel me to slap anyone who dares say yes. And don’t say I didn’t lead you out of the rhetorical trap.

If we want to seek the essence beneath the classifications, to understand what the cinematic medium truly is, it’s that concept of movie that matters. A cutesy, sweet, reassuring nickname—just like the Yankees love to do—for something simple, raw, and seminal: the moving image. A fantasy we Homo sapiens have chased since forever, only to reach it and not quite know what to do with it.

It’s quite amusing to read histories of cinema that talk about Méliès and the Lumière brothers as directors, just as it’s always amusing to apply our own categories to distant times and places. These gentlemen—and many others who weren’t lucky enough to survive the market’s selective pressure—were first and foremost inventing a technology, then figuring out how to exploit it.

Open to so many uses that, at first, it seemed to have none. “Cinema is an invention without a future,” the Lumières themselves said. An invention, not an art. And not even an isolated invention: it simply won the commercial survival battle among many similar technologies sharing the same goal, thanks to a solid dose of dumb luck—just like all successful technologies, ideas, and people.

That’s the point: moving images are a technology, only partly defined by the ways we use them. They called it the cinematograph—a factual, concrete name: the writing of moving images. That’s the base. Then we’ll see. From self-propelled carriages we made cars, motorcycles, tractors, trucks, buses, trains, forklifts, toys. From processors, we made computers, cameras, music players, alarm systems, vacuum cleaners.

Like many technologies capable of reshaping the world around us, the cinematograph is anti-fragile. It doesn’t take damage—it improves with each blow it receives.

The pioneers quickly saw how well the medium lent itself to the most human of all human things: storytelling. After a few years of cinematic views, where the point was the shot itself, per sé, intellectually and commercially captivating (from the train POV shot of passing tracks to today’s 5, 6, 20D mall cinemas to VR venues is just a blink)—these views began to align into sequences with narrative tension. Each view tried to tell an event—some self-styled intellectuals might call it a long shot—so that, by watching a dozen in a row, the viewer could infer the unfolding of a story.

There was no great intrinsic specificity in the cinematograph, other than being exactly that: moving image. There was no language, no set of formal and expressive characteristics. Silent cinema began to shape those. With it, images became more than themselves—they became tiles in a narrative and expressive mosaic, built under the guidance of a script and, now yes, a director. Then came sound. Still tiles, but part of a completely different mosaic.

Television, but also Videogames, Reels, video podcasts, YouTube video essays—same process. The mosaic changes. The shape and color of the tiles change. And with film gone even from cinemas, the material of the tiles has changed too. But the drive to assemble them remains, even with completely different mosaics.

Moving images emerged from our minds and changed the world—and with it, our minds too. They go on, and they will keep going.

We vented our censored contemporary violence in Grand Theft Auto, survived COVID on Zoom, show solidarity with Zelensky on social media, and dream of revolution after watching Money Heist. We have too many series to binge to start a real one, but let’s not delve into that now. Motion pictures remain the foundation of how we live.

So maybe cinema has one foot in the grave. But in an anti-fragile system, the demise of a weak component is a healthy cleanup process. It clears the way for what works better. It warns the others: don’t follow me—death lies this way.

Let’s try to quantify how much cinema remains within the broader phenomenon of motion pictures. That’s just a fancy way of saying: compare the number of movies you watch to the number of YouTube videos, Stories, ads, and anything else that’s a moving image. Really, a few trees are going dead in a whole nature reserve. They were the most beautiful trees, no doubt—and it’s a shame to see them rot. But the market, which is certainly not a natural phenomenon, is sometimes eerily similar to nature—especially in its ruthless logic. And criticizing the market’s ethical or aesthetic flaws is as ridiculous as blaming a soft, cuddly kitten for killing a grasshopper.

The nature reserve we mentioned cares for itself. It uses trees, plants, and all else for its own survival—not the other way around.

And we can rest easy: the reserve called Motion Pictures is alive and well. Where it’s headed, we don’t know. But let’s not panic just because a paradigm dear to us is giving way to the unknown. It happens.

And really, it’s the perfect time to say it: we’ll be watching.