Peter Lunenfeld has a Focus piece in the May issue of Artforum about "City of Cinema: Paris 1850-1907," a show at LACMA that is up through July 20th, 2022.

“City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907”
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA)
Curated by Leah Lehmbeck and Britt Salvesen, with Vanessa R. Schwartz

THE DEATH OF CINEMA has been announced almost as often as the death of God. And why not link film to religion? For true cineastes, basking in the reflected images of more stars than there are in heaven (as the old MGM tagline had it) supersedes any epiphanies in church. But in Hollywood these days, signs of decay, if not of mortality, are everywhere. On Sunset Boulevard, the iconic Cinerama Dome has been shuttered since the start of Covid, the Oscars have been shedding categories and viewers, and box-office receipts were trending down even before the virus. If there’s a home for the industry in the twenty-first century, it’s probably not Hollywood but Los Gatos, the sleepy Bay Area town streaming goliath Netflix calls home.