The key word in most discussions of cinema is “possibility.” There is a merely classifying use of the word, as in Panofsky’s engaging judgment that “within their self-imposed limitations the early Disney films … represent, as it were, a chemically pure distillation of cinematic possibilities.” But behind this relatively neutral usage lurks a more polemical sense of cinema’s possibilities, in which what is regularly intimated is the obsolescence of theatre and its supersession by films.
