Narrative Cinema Is Declining. Cinema as Memory Machine Is Not.

When I say narrative cinema is declining, I don't mean that stories no longer matter. Although I wouldn't blame you if you think I'm contradicting my earlier post titled "Why do we keep returning to stories?" Stories still matter. Or maybe what I mean is story worlds. 

We still follow people, conflicts, desires, losses, reversals, and unfinished questions. What seems less alive is the assumption that cinema works best when it explains itself through a clean sequence of causes and effects.

Some films stay with us because we understand them. But a lot more stay with us because we can't quite settle them.

That second kind of cinema works differently. It doesn't deliver a simple, neatly tied-up story. It leaves behind fragments of an image, a silence, a gesture, a room, a colour, a repeated sound. A bit like the residue of a dream. The film continues after the screening because the viewer keeps assembling it internally. Meaning does not arrive all at once. It gathers and scratches at the door of our consciousness.

This is what I mean by cinema as a Dynamic Memory Machine.

A film can become a structure for remembering rather than a container for plot. It gives the audience pieces. It creates a bit of friction between them. It lets the viewer make connections across time, sensation, and emotional residue. The result isn't confusion for its own sake. It's aiming for participation. The viewer becomes part of the film’s afterlife.

This matters because audiences are often described as if they have lost the ability to pay attention. I teach university students and they often say in that self-deprecating way, "Our generation has no attention span." They tell me if I plan on making online content for them, I should keep it to five seconds. But what I see is a generation of people who can spend hours following crumbs of image, atmosphere, and texture, piecing it together into a three to five hour experience. 

I do not think that attention-deficit is the right phrase. Not when the media is full of  obscure videos, atmospheric games, analogue textures, archival footage, slow cinema, and liminal spaces. It's a fractured digital culture that people are compelled to assemble. They are not allergic to duration. They are allergic to the emptiness of one meaning and having all the action relentlessly directing them to its pre-calculated target.

What people respond to is habitation.

A film can offer a place to dwell emotionally. It can create a room inside the mind. And in doing so, it can refuse to over-explain. It can trust ambiguity, silence, temporal instability, repetition, and fragments of memory. The audience then reconstructs the work through their own experience.

This is where my work in Crosspoints connects. In a sense, it's the result of a personal journey through all of what I've just related. 

When I coach acting, or when I'm performing, my work begins from this very premise. Meaning is not fixed in advance. It emerges through relation. An actor doesn't “play the character” as a finished literary object. The actor brings a lived, embodied field of memory, sensation, impulse, association, and imagination into contact with the story world. The character and the actor occupy two different domains. The already-written and the imaginarily-lived worlds.

Performance happens in the crossing between those domains.

It is not decorative. It is structural. It isn't flat psychology. It's living inside an imaginary. It is the kind of double exposure I mentioned in my earlier post.  When the two images align, resonate with each other, distort, echo, or contradict, something active appears. They help the actor find the deep architecture beneath behaviour.

Cinema can work this way too.

A fragmented film is not a cheeky rebellion against structure. It shifts structure from plot mechanics to mind architecture. Instead of asking, “What happens next?” it may ask, “What remains from what you last saw?” Instead of guiding through explanation, it invites reconstruction.

I made my acting deck to offer actors and directors a practical way to think through this. A scene is not only a unit of narrative. It is a field of forces. Wants, images, partners, emotional essences, expectations, emblems, and shifts in attention all create this kind of movement and they require a different way to score them. The actor builds a score from these forces. The film director can (and often does) think similarly. Image, rhythm, silence, object, repetition, rupture, and return are part of the cinematic score.

In this sense, I have always felt that cinema and acting share a problem. Both must transform representation into experience. Crosspoints treats performance as an act of construction, not illustration.

Perhaps the future of independent cinema doesn't need to exist in louder, brighter spectacle. It may require films that behave more like unstable, sensory memory. It may be partial, intimate, and unfinished.

The strongest films, for me, have always been the ones that don't end when the credits roll. They continue as fragments inside us. They ask us to complete them. Misremember them, argue with them, dream through them, and carry them forward. Possibly to do something with them in our own lives.