“As we head toward a way of life organized around the diversity of screens — I’m looking over my laptop at the television, while my iPod charges on the desk until I take it with me to my next screening, where I’ll be sure to shut off my cellphone — there will be at least an equal diversity of art forms and ways of appreciating them, alone or in groups. And they will continue to cross-pollinate.”

That is the conclusion reached by A. O. Scott in his important essay, The Screening of America, in the November 23, 2008 special issue of the New York Times’s Sunday Magazine.

Scott foresees the death of cinema as we know it, but at the same time projects its transformation into new avatars fed by dazzling advances in high-definition and screen technology. “The digital age may well turn out to be a golden age of cinephilia,” Scott suggests, “with a wider variety of movies available for viewing in better conditions than ever.”

RC