I spent two rainy, somewhat cold, humid days in Paris last week. Exhausted and dirty, I felt like a young hero from a Balzac novel: none of the nobility, all of the fervor. At least I wasn’t wearing Tevas and crew socks. I had been travelling for three weeks, and I wanted to relax in the European city I best knew my way around. For most, Paris is the city of light because they illuminate all the monuments at night. For me, Paris’ association with light is due to the cinema. When I was small, Paris belonged to Sabrina and the countless other charming movies I saw with my mother (not to mention The Aristocats); as I grew older, it belonged to Renoir, Ophüls, Buñuel, and Godard.

This time, the city came to belong to another Paris: Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders dreamy desert rose that swept the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a beautiful film: shot in the American west, it delights in the huge landscape and blank faces of its characters; at times I thought it kind of a remake of The Searchers. When the film moves, briefly, to urban centers like Los Angeles and Houston, it’s as smart as the best parts of Zabriskie Point or Playtime, and more beautiful than either.

I’d seen the movie before, but I hadn’t seen the film.

Seeing Paris, Texas reminded me of the cinema, real cinema, and how I haven’t seen something that wasn’t digitally projected since I don’t know when, and I miss it. I miss the grain and the cackle of the projector, the imperfect image, the projectionist who misses a beat because he’s engrossed in the film or making out with his girlfriend, the warmth and the color. But this longing isn’t just a question of moralistic aesthetics. Cinema doesn’t have to be film (shot on film): it has to be cinema. Everyone is familiar with Susan Sontag’s rallying call for form over content. I don’t want to repeat it, but I think this might be an appropriate time to relearn or at least remember it. Now that we can ask–as Godard himself has–what was cinema?, we have to at least remember that it wasn’t whatever it is we see now.

Godard once said cinema was the last form of public transportation. The Lumière brothers took us to Lyon, Georges Méliès took us to the moon; we’ve been traveling ever since. The cinema takes us there together—I know, I know, it sounds like the slogan from BP’s upcoming save-our-image-please-trust-us ad campaign, but it’s true. The problem with the home theater isn’t that you lose some illusory connection to your neighbor or the guy in cool glasses sitting in the back; it’s that an honest encounter with the erotics of cinema is a confrontation that’s only possible in common, in public. Like a train wreck or an airplane crash.

What’s lost, then, with the digital technology and the dispersion of cinema (which makes it, really, anti-cinema), is this in common, what Godard referred to as public transportation. Digital technology takes you there alone: you watch something on your iPod and you let the world know you’re not paying attention to them and fine, whatever. I take my laptop everywhere and watch whatever I want. You can watch the entirety of The Aristocats on Youtube, or you can just watch that one great scene. I do it all the time: greatest quotes from Superbad, the very end of My Darling Clementine, Hollis Frampton fragments or World War Two newsreels.

The joke, though, is on me. I remain unmoved: I watch comedies and I don’t laugh, I watch Paris, Texas and I don’t cry. You watch it alone and you travel alone and you remain totally and completely insulated from the potential a work of cinema has to move you because you remove it from its form. You neuter it. You consume its content and discard everything that is cinema.

Paris, Texas’ protagonist, Travis, has a problem: he can only move forward alone–he can only unite his son and his wife and then he has to keep going, alone. It’s a modern perversion: movement and freedom. I can’t sit still when I pop something into the DVD player at home. Sometimes I think the best place to watch movies is on an airplane. It might be the model for a cinema of the future: everyone individual, their own nation, moving at once. But it won’t be cinema. This is something else, something that moves you without your being moved.