Richard Brody found a French book on cinema he had never heard of (a rarity). To borrow Brody’s word, the author, Roger Boussinot, was a “prophet.” Take the following excerpt from his 1967 text, “Le Cinéma Est Mort, Vive le Cinéma!” (The Cinema Is Dead, Long Live Cinema!), discussing how technology will advance to the point that everyone will be a filmmaker and how it will impact the form itself:

Here, there’s something absolutely new that will emerge: …the character who evolves in front of the camera… is a raw reality that must be raised, as such, to a sort of abstraction, which is just what’s needed for it to attain a communicable truth: neither particular nor universal (this doesn’t exist), but relative. So, goodbye strict numbered shooting script, with the precise definition of shots, camera movements, placement of actors—that is, the cart before the horse. Between the cinema of theatrical convention and the cast-fishing of conventional journalism as practiced by Jean-Luc Godard, there’s a new form to discover in the realm of fiction.

That bit, written forty-five years ago, aptly describes the current state of indie cinema. Great find.