Arnheim and the Complete Film

In his essay "The Complete Film" Rudolph Arheim projects the technical development of film as it pushes, "the mechanical limitation of nature to an extreme." (212). He outlines how the addition of sound to film, the addition of color to film and the eventual push to stereoscopic film will stunt the growth of the silent film before it could even begin to truly explore its possibilities and in the process diminish film's ability to be art. He also believes this will be a continuous problem will film as technology develops at exponentially greater paces. He says so much when he writes, "We shall have color films and stereoscopic films, and the artistic potentialities of the sound film will be crushed at an even earlier stage (than the silent film) of their development." (212). This sentiment is delivered early in the essay, quickly establishing the thesis of the essay and at first read I felt a strong disagreement with everything Arnheim was saying mainly because I disagreed with the above quote. I felt he would feel differently about the artistic qualities of film if he could have seen Avatar, Gravity, or the upcoming Interstellar all of which feature stunning visuals best seen on a massive Imax screen (growing screens being another concern of Arnheim's). Film and movies made from it are much more narrative nowadays, especially in the public domain, which has resulted in a perceived diminishing importance of film form, something clearly important to Arnheim, with film form and its limitations being the source of film's art. But I still felt his pessimistic view on the future of film was way off base. Sure, movies are different now, but there is still a massive amount of attention paid to film form, it's just now focused on special effects. It was this thought that made me realize Arnheim was right. We live in a time in which film is dying and dying fast. Movies aren't dying. Movies will live much longer than we ever will, but the use of film to make movies is an art with one foot in the grave. Because of this it would be disingenuous to refer to nearly all contemporary movies as films. Sure, some stout supporters of film still use it, but the number of these types of people is shrinking. There is little reason to believe that soon nobody will use film to make movies. Then film will die. But we'll still have movies. Will all the things that do into making movies: the sets, actors, costumes, lighting, music, stories; will all of that be enough to consider movies, not films, as a new art? Wouldn't digital movies just be the next progression in the world of graphic art, much in the same way the film developed from the photograph?