Movie Revolution

For people used to LPs, the CD at first seemed impossibly small. This week, the digital generation experienced its equivalent shape-shift. The PSP, the portable version of the Sony PlayStation, released at midnight on Wednesday, takes game-discs and DVDs which make CDs look like platters.

Cupping these little silvery discs in palms which leave a big margin of skin, those from eucharistic religions may think of hosts. But this holy grail for technology may come to be seen as satanic by traditional cinema because the PSP, though primarily aimed at gamers, represents the arrival of the first genuinely portable DVD-player. (The devices marketed as such would function as a hand-set only for a giant.)

Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans now wait to take their movies as home entertainment and, as the circle of the disc itself gets smaller, the circle of those using them can only widen. Some industry figures, led by the president of Disney, Bob Iger, have even predicted that DVDs will soon be released on the same day as film premieres in cinemas.

Going out and staying in will just become "entertainment options", like the simultaneous release of books in printed and audio versions.

Perhaps surprisingly, Spike Lee, one of cinema's more radical talents, has spoken up for the traditional popcorn model. Interviewed at the Venice film festival, he bemoaned the move of movie-viewing from multiplex to home: "I love cinema. I don't think you can replicate the sensation of watching a film on a big screen, in a theatre, with people around you as a community."

Lee is a practised controversialist but the weakness of these arguments suggest that the old-fashioned picture-house experience is going to struggle to survive. Citing screen-size - long the strongest card for opponents of home movie-viewing - no longer works when many domestic cineastes have in their living rooms screens not markedly less wide or flat than you can see by paying eight quid to a chain.

If directors want to make a fetish of big projection, then they should refuse to have their films shown by airlines on back-of-seat screens.

Even Lee's invocation of the "community" aspect of film-going is tendentious: surely more families and friends have watched films together on a regular basis since DVD arrived than ever before.

It's also significant that Lee doesn't mention picture quality. That once powerful trump card of the popcorn gang has dropped from the pack now that digital transmission at home often produces a clearer image than reel projection.

But DVD's greatest achievement has been to transform the nature of the memory of entertainment. In the past, the viewer of cinema or television was subject both to short-term amnesia (the misunderstood plot-twist, the punchline obliterated by a laugh or cough) and to long-term memory-loss: you were lucky to see a classic twice in your lifetime. It's true that video began to intensify recollection, but DVD, with its chapter selection and commentaries, has permitted total recall. If someone likes a film or TV show now, they can know it as well as poems learned by rote at school.

DVD was much praised on this account at last weekend's Edinburgh International Television Festival. The dramatist Stephen Poliakoff, who left the BBC for cinema in the 80s after his play Soft Targets was screened only once, now knows that his work can be repeated at the viewer's private pleasure.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant revealed that the knowledge that The Office and Extras would be chapter-selected, frozen and rewound encouraged them to aim for perfectionism.

The BBC chairman, Michael Grade, has pledged to end repeats on the BBC. But the paradox is that the sales of DVDs indicate a hunger for repeats of quality pieces. As Poliakoff suggested in Edinburgh, it can be argued that television doesn't repeat its best programmes enough.

This technical revolution brings disadvantages. The quantity of movie buffs and bores in the population has increased, and may reach toxic levels. And the horrible torrent of movie remakes of old TV shows (Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas now, for God's sake) must result from directors and producers having access to a library of material which, until a few years ago, you could only get by marrying into a Hollywood mogul's family.

Yet Spike Lee, who extended American cinema into subject matter and communities it long ignored, can surely not be nostalgic for a time when people waited (often forlornly) for a well-publicised film to reach their neighbourhood or for a TV company to buy and screen it. What an astonishingly lucky generation it is that has cinema now literally, with the arrival of the PSP's little discs, in the palm of its hand.