It happened one night. For most of the 1990s the cinema was a meeting place of popularity and intelligence, its gods a seemingly inexhaustible stream of directors who could make films at once accessible and bold, epic and digestible - American but independent in spirit. They were films that everyone wanted to see, that immediately passed into folklore, but not dumb films, not vacuous films. Cinema seemed to matter, and it would stay that way, we thought.
And then it changed. One day you scanned the film listings and there was nothing to detain you, only the packaged and the patronising. Today mainstream cinema looks stupider than it has for a long time. This is real middlebrow moronism of the kind we haven't seen since Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep got their parcels mixed up in Falling In Love in 1984. We have become used to expecting more of cinema. We're going to suffer now.
Cinema has died at its American centre, and again the only films worth seeing have subtitles. Who's the hero of British cinema today? Jean-Luc Godard, who is being celebrated everywhere, and nowhere more sweetly than in a funny British short currently on release called Je t'aime John Wayne that puts its Londoner protagonist in the role of a Godard fantasist. Except, instead of being in Paris dreaming of Hollywood, he's in London longing for Paris and Godard's subversive cinema.
Godard also features in Persistence of Vision, a new strand of avant-garde cinema at this year's Edinburgh film festival. This programme of experimental film juxtaposes international cineastes such as the Irish film-maker Clare Langan, with her disturbing visionary desert journey, Too Dark For Night, and underground figures such as the American surrealist Kerry Laitala. There's no crossover potential here, no one interested in making a splash at Sundance, just the avant-garde back where it belongs - in relative obscurity.
In the end, it seems the glamour and urgency of cinema in the 1990s were based on a fantasy, on the myth that art and Babylon can be reconciled, that independent cinema can have its cake and eat it. It was a time that produced hugely enjoyable and culturally savvy films - but great ones? Set even the best, Barton Fink or Pulp Fiction, alongside The Leopard, Alphaville, Orphée, Rome: Open City, The Spirit of the Beehive, A Man Escaped, The Battle of Algiers or Apocalypse Now, and they wilt.
The new US independent cinema was a success story of translations and transformations. It wore its knowledge lightly; take the Coen brothers' elevator attendant in Barton Fink, a character brilliantly concocted out of 1940s cartoons and Kafka's Amerika. American independent cinema brought together popular culture and high art, its defining image John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in Pulp Fiction in a scene that simultaneously revived a 1970s star's career and quoted Godard's Bande à Part.
It seems 100 years ago. Pulp Fiction's idea of a hybrid film culture now seems as naive as that of the Nouvelle Vague itself, which expected to change the world by making better films. Cultural facility has been etiolated into pretension in those films with strangely abstract titles: Bodies, Rest and Motion. With the odd honourable exception, the work of Harmony Korine, independent cinema seems to have become an R&D division for the studios.
The seeds of disaster lay in the very idea of a popular art cinema, the belief you could break bread with Hollywood without turning into it. Just as the Coens' monstrous studio boss decides he can get that Barton Fink feeling elsewhere, so Hollywood decided it could do its own independent films. Thus American Beauty.
The British connection here is interesting. For Britain in particular misreads faux-dumb as an excuse for being dead thick. The supposed new respect for the great maverick directors, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, had no depth to it; there was still no belief in a right to fail, which is inseparable from the right to experiment. When Scorsese's Casino was released the same weekend as Trainspotting, it was the British film that thrived. What a joke.
American film-goers, at least in the major cities, are much more open than ours to the history of cinema. Recently in New York I saw people queue around the block to see a Jacques Tati film. We find it easy to dismiss the kind of European films that audiences elsewhere have never stopped caring about, and seem to have taken the stylish populism of the new American cinema as an excuse to forget the history of cinema. No need any more to know the difference between Un Chien Andalou and a poke in the eye. But without a cine-literate audience, there's very little chance of making great films. Persistence of Vision, the Edinburgh avant garde strand is called. Here's hoping.
• Persistence of Vision is at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh (0131-623 8030), from August 13 to 25. Edinburgh College of Art (0131-221 6000) is holding a related exhibition until August 26.
