Directors used to take great care with such things: spatial integrity was another part of the unspoken contract with audiences, a codicil to the narrative doctrine of the scriptorium. It allowed viewers to understand, say, how much danger a man was facing when he stuck his head above a rock in a gunfight, or where two secret lovers at a dinner party were sitting in relation to their jealous enemies. Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewer’s head—so that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that emotion, the movie wouldn’t have cast its spell.

This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn’t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.

A dominating individual, a dynamically evolving group—the classical American cinema was always centered in character one way or another. It was an ideal, but hardly the only ideal, and I am certainly not suggesting a return to 1939. Most movies in those years, of course, were nowhere near as good as Jezebel and Stagecoach, and at their worst Hollywood movies in the classical period were draped in the molasses of sentiment and reassurance.

After the war, it was time to pull off the drapes. Bazin and also James Agee loved the Italian Neo-Realists of the 1940s and 1950s, who produced a plainer image and a harsher moral tone than Hollywood ever did; and if Bazin had lived past 1958, when Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, and the others were just getting started, he would have loved the flowing, open rhythms and off-hand literary flavor of the New Wave. In America, television and other media entered the arena, luring viewers away, and the old tropes got stretched or broken into new shapes. To name just a few of the famous ones: the point-of-view camera and shock cutting of Hitchcock; the expressionist lighting and radio-studio echo chambers of Orson Welles; the dynamic architecture of widescreen composition in David Lean; the breathtaking and deeply moving tracking shots of Max Ophüls; Stanley Kubrick’s cold, discordant tableaux; the savagery, both humane and inhumane, of Akira Kurosawa and Sam Peckinpah; the crowded operatic realism of Coppola in the first two Godfather movies; the layered, richly allusive dialogue and sour-mash melancholy of Robert Altman; Steven Spielberg’s visually eccentric manipulation of pop archetypes; Quentin Tarantino’s discontinuous time scheme in Pulp Fiction; and many, many others. Sometimes directors subtracted conventional elements from the old syntax; sometimes they overloaded the medium, refusing an obvious emotional pay-off while reaching a purer, more intense emotion through the exaggeration of a single element in filmmaking—say, the sustained, lens-scarring monologues of Ingmar Bergman, which reveal the soul of a performer so powerfully that it exposes the soul of the viewer (to himself) as well.

Audiences were no longer enveloped by movies in the same comforting way; sometimes even mainstream commercial movies affronted or even assaulted us. On the whole, this felt good. To be exposed to ugliness and horror, to be disturbed rather than cosseted, overburdened rather than babied, never hurt a moviegoer yet, and it made many of us happy not to have everything prepared and cushioned for us. Abruptness in the form of, say, the jump cuts in Breathless or the breaks in continuity in Annie Hall and dozens of other movies inject little spurts of energy into a scene. In such instances, we were not bothered by discontinuities from shot to shot—not when the sequences worked well within an exciting overall conception the continuity of which may have been intellectual and emotional rather than physical. After the war, modernist film-makers also found it impossible to believe in a coherent moral world, and their narratives no longer meted out punishments and rewards in the old Burbank-bookkeeper’s manner. Moral realism felt closer to the way we viewed our own lives, in which we are rarely heroes and few confident or outraged expectations ever meet their longed-for fulfillment in justice.

The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence.

THE STRUCTURE OF the movie business—the shaping of production decisions by marketing—has kicked bloody hell out of the language of film. But the business framework is not operating alone. Film, a photographic and digital medium, is perhaps more vulnerable than any of the other arts to the post-modernist habits of recycling and quotation. Imitation, pastiche, and collage have become dominant strategies, and there is an excruciating paradox in this development: two of the sprightly media forms derived from movies—commercials and music videos—began to dominate movies. The art experienced a case of blowback.

As everyone knows, we can read an image much more quickly than anyone thought possible forty years ago, and in recent years many commercials have been cut faster and faster. The film-makers know that we are not so much receiving information as getting a visual impression, a mood, a desire. A truly hip commercial has no obvious connection to the product being sold, though selling is still its job. What, then, is being sold at a big movie that is cut the same way? The experience of going to the movie itself, the sensation of being rushed, dizzied, overwhelmed by the images. Michael Bay wasn’t interested in what happened at Pearl Harbor. He was interested in his whizzing fantasia of the event. Nothing important happens in The Avengers. As in half of these big movies, the world is about to end because of some invading force; but the world is always about to end in digital spectacles, and when everything is at stake, nothing is at stake. The larger the movie, the more “content” becomes incidental, even disposable.

In recent years, some of the young movie directors have come out of commercials and MTV. If a director is just starting out in feature films, he doesn’t have to be paid much, and the studios can throw a script at him with the assumption that the movie, if nothing else, will have a great “look.” He has already produced that look in his commercials or videos, which he shoots on film and then finishes digitally—adding or subtracting color, changing the sky, putting in flame or mist, retarding or speeding up movement. In a commercial for a new car, the blue-tinted streets rumble and crack, trees give up their roots, and the silver SUV, cool as a titanium cucumber, rides over the steaming fissures. Wow! What a film-maker! Studio executives or production executives who get financing from studios do not have to instruct such a young director to cut a feature very fast and put in a lot of thrills, because for their big movies they hire only the kind of people who will cut it fast and put in thrills. That the young director has never worked with a serious dramatic structure, or even with actors, may not be considered a liability.

The results are there to see. At the risk of obviousness: techniques that hold your eye in a commercial or video are not suited to telling stories or building dramatic tension. In a full-length movie, images conceived that way begin to cancel each other out or just slip off the screen; the characters are just types or blurred spots of movement. The links with fiction and theater and classical film technique have been broken. The center no longer holds; mere anarchy is loosed upon the screen; the movie winds up a mess.

So are American movies finished, a cultural irrelevance? Despite almost everything, I don’t think the game is up, not by any means. There are talented directors who manage to keep working either within the system or just on the edges of it. Some of the independent films that have succeeded, against the odds, in gaining funding and at least minimal traction in the theaters, are obvious signs of hope. Terence Malick is alive and working hard. Digital is still in its infancy, and if it moves into the hands of people who have a more imaginative and delicate sense of spectacle, it could bloom in any one of a dozen ways. The micro-budget movies now made on the streets or in living rooms might also take off if they give up on sub-Cassavetes ideas of improvisation, and accept the necessity of a script. There is enough talent sloshing around in the troubled vessel of American movies to keep the art form alive. But the trouble is real, and it has been growing for more than twenty-five years. By now there is a wearying, numbing, infuriating sameness to the cycle of American releases year after year. Much of the time, adults cannot find anything to see. And that reason alone is enough to make us realize that American movies are in a terrible crisis, which is not going to end soon.

David Denby is a film critic for The New Yorker and the author of Do the Movies Have a Future? (Simon & Schuster). This article appeared in the October 4, 2012 issue of the magazine.