The Hollywood empire was built over the course of a century through hard-nosed business practices such as block booking, dumping and buying up the competition, turning the silver screen into a goldmine in the process. The business logic that has driven the industry since its beginnings has gone into hyperdrive in recent years, with astronomical sums invested in productions and promotion. Ironically that massive outlay has gone toward churning out a flat, made-in-Hollywood universalism that can be exported planet-wide, but which is simultaneously losing audiences, primarily to the digital world, at an accelerating pace. The apparently insurmountable barriers of finance and distribution to entry into the world of entertainment have served, so far, to keep smaller players out of the frame and, Fischer contends, have destroyed the industry’s creative potential. It turns out too much money can kill cinema just as certainly as not enough.

In The Decline of the Hollywood Empire, artist and philosopher Hervé Fischer heralds an inevitable move from 35 mm to digital distribution, which will take what has until now existed only on the margins of the “entertainment industry”—independent film, amateur film, documentary and other genres—from bit players to starring roles: how the Trojan horse of digital technology and distribution, in the hands of independent producers, could well toll the bell for Hollywood’s hegemony in the business of film.

Philosopher and multimedia artist Hervé Fischer graduated from Paris’s École Normale Supérieure. With a Ph.D. in sociology, he taught sociology of culture and communication for many years at the Sorbonne.Since 1999, he has been working as a digital artist and has held individual exhibitions in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires (2003), in the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales de Montevideo (2004) and in the MNBA de Santiago de Chile (2006).Fischer has worked tirelessly to promote innovative art forms that utilize and highlight science and technology. He is co-founder and co-president, with Ginette Major, of La Cité des arts et des nouvelles technologies de Montréal. In 1990, he started the Quebec International Science Film Festival now called Téléscience, of which he was the executive director until 2002. Since 1997, he has been president of the International Federation of Multimedia Associations. Fischer is also a member of the national advisory committee for the Canadian Culture Online Program (Canadian Heritage).Fischer was elected holder of the Daniel Langlois Chair for Fine Arts and Digital Technologies at Montreal’s Concordia University (2000–02) and developed the concept of a media lab—a consortium between Concordia and UQAM universities—which has become Hexagram, a non-profit centre of excellence in multimedia research.He is an internationally recognized lecturer and has published numerous articles, papers and books on art, communications and digital technology. Fischer speaks French, English, German and Spanish fluently and even some Chinese. He holds citizenship in both Canada and France.

Hervé Fischer's profile page

Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier’s And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois’ The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning the award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. Novels she has translated were contenders for CBC Canada Reads in 2015 and 2019 and one was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.

Rhonda Mullins' profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation

“AN ESSENTIAL READ. That sums up the importance of Fischer’s book … ” – Le Canada français

“A work that will definitely interest anyone who cares about the future of cinema.” – La Presse

“The bard of new media (and new times) has released a fervent, crusading book that offers both an education and a forecast … The facts may well soon bear out The Decline of the Hollywood Empire.” – Qui fait quoi