I begin from a simple hypothesis, but one involving infinite detours: the lived, more or less collective experience of a film projected in a cinema, in the dark, according to an unalterably precise screening procedure, remains the condition for a special memory experience, one from which every other viewing situation more or less departs. This supposes a certain rule of faith of which the spectator would be the incarnation, in the unfolding of a liturgy associated with film, with cinema, and with film in the cinema situation.

I wrote “remains the condition,” because the distinctive reality of this experience – more or less felt over the entire history of cinema's development from its very beginning, through the so-called silent era and the first years of the talkies – comes essentially to be formulated in the postwar period, alongside what we usually call modern cinema, including all the thinking (critical and theoretical) that accompanies it. And that experience has stayed in place until today, when we are aware of an ever-greater loss, since cinema's centenary and the century's end, to the extent that a conviction concerning the possible death of cinema (or at least its irremediable decline) has been formed and formulated – a situation extending far beyond the already ancient war openly won by television, into the more pressing, fundamental mutation belonging to the digital image, with everything it brings along concerning both the very nature of images and their modes of distribution and consumption.

There are at least two ways of approaching such a topic. The first would be historical, reviewing the specific norms defining the spectator, norms corresponding to this or that moment in the already long history of cinema – without forgetting all the variations according to the times, as well as places, social formations, countries and audiences. But I am not a historian and, anyhow, it would be crazy to open up such a vast framework here. The second way, which I have chosen, is to retain those elements from the past that may illuminate our present-day condition.

In order to encapsulate what is essential in reflection on cinema from its beginnings up to the mid-1950s, I have read or re-read three anthologies (in French, for convenience): Marcel Lapierre's Anthologie du cinéma, Pierre Lherminier's L’Art du cinema, and Daniel Banda and José Moure's Le Cinéma: naissance d’un art 1895-1920.