Death of Cinema - in 3 parts.

Below are two essays and one excerpt that were brought to my attention by David Bordwell. The first two are links to articles written in 1999 by Godfrey Cheshire that very prescient. (Long, but worth the read.)

http://nypress.com/the-death-of-film-the-decay-of-cinema/

Part 2 of of Cheshire's  "Decay of Cinema" can be found here (some overlap here, but if you skip down to the 12th paragraph that starts off with 'When people first saw film..' you can pick up the thread from there):

http://nypress.com/part-two-of-the-death-of-film-the-decay-of-cinema/

More recently, Tarantino also weighed in on the subject of cinema being dead, because it's now mutated into a different beast altogether ("television in public"):

Tarantino: No, not at all. But I don't intend to be a director deep into my old age.

Russell: Wait a minute. That's bad news for everybody.

Tarantino: I'll probably just be a writer, or I'll just write novels, and I'll write film literature and film books and subtextual film criticism, things like that.

THR: Why do you plan to make that change?

Tarantino: Well, part of the reason I'm feeling this way is, I can't stand all this digital stuff. This is not what I signed up for. Even the fact that digital presentation is the way it is right now -- I mean, it's television in public, it's just television in public. That's how I feel about it. I came into this for film.

Affleck:  Digital projection as well? 'Cause film's over. I mean, there are no film projectors in the country.

Tarantino: Yeah, and that's why --

Russell: I won't shoot digital.

Tarantino: No, I'm not talking about shooting digital.

Russell: Do you shoot digital?

Tarantino: No, I hate that stuff. I shoot film. But to me, even digital projection is -- it's over, as far as I'm concerned. It's over. So if I'm gonna do TV in public, I'd rather just write one of my big scripts and do it as a miniseries for HBO, and then I don't have the time pressure that I'm always under, and I get to actually use all the script. I always write these huge scripts that I have to kind of -- my scripts aren't like blueprints. They're not novels, but they're novels written with script format. And so I'm adapting the script into a movie every day. The one movie that I was actually able to use everything -- where you actually have the entire breadth of what I spent a year writing -- was the two Kill Bill movies 'cause it's two movies. So if I'm gonna do another big epic thing again, it'll probably be like a six-hour miniseries or something.''

(excerpted from here):

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ben-affleck-quentin-tarantino-4-394576

For a more optimistic view, read link below (which has a number of very interesting comments too):

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/magazine/film-culture-isnt-dead-after-all.html?_r=0

Also, looking forward, is this bit on The Dawn of High Frame Rate Cinema:

http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-hobbit-debuts-high-frame-rate-cinema