On October 3, a report of the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC) revealed that cinema attendance in September 2022 had reached a critical level with 7.38 million admissions, the lowest level since the reopening of theaters on May 18, 2021, at the end of a year of pandemic. The shower turned out to be all the colder as the sector relied heavily on the “back-to-school effect” following a sluggish summer. With the exception of the year 2020, that of the health crisis and the closure of places of culture, such results had not been recorded since 1980.
The causes of this disaffection of the rooms may well be multiple, but we nevertheless regularly hear a little haunting music that resonates like a search for culprits and appeals to the vox populi. “The spectators do not want to go to the cinema to be pissed off”, thus exclaimed Jérôme Seydoux, the boss of the Pathé group, at the microphone of France Inter, Wednesday October 12, explicitly putting in the hot seat, if one can say, French auteur cinema. We couldn’t be further from Martin Scorsese, who said on October 13 on the stage of the New York Film Festival: “Since the 1980s, we only look at the numbers. (…) Cinema is devalued, discredited, diminished on all sides, not so much its commercial part as its artistic part. »
Regulation and multiplex
As we have understood, it is this part that the French protectionist model, in this for a long time exemplary, has sanctuarized and withdrawn from the obligations of the market, the so-called “auteur” cinema, or, according to a well-known label, the ‘art and essay’, which would be guilty of not entertaining the general public and of spoiling the party with annoying subjects. Pointed out, suddenly judged in the name of profitability even within these bodies, we feel that its relations with the public authorities, as with the supervisory authorities, have been strained for a few years, as evidenced by the recent appeal to general states of cinema.
It is also necessary to go back, to better understand the concern expressed today. The previous “cinema crisis”, in 1980, linked to the development of the videocassette market and the suburbanization of audiences, had led, over the decade, to the closure of many theaters in city centers, known as “neighborhoods”. Faced with these new players shifting the use of films into the private sphere, responses were very quickly provided thanks to consultation between professionals and public authorities. The first of these was regulation. It resulted in the law of July 29, 1982, inaugurating a legislative structure soon known as the “media chronology”. Each broadcaster then has a window in a route favoring the room, to which the first exclusivity is reserved. The sector, for its part, wasted no time in embarking on vast restructuring which took the form, in the 1990s, of a new model of concentration of screens: the multiplex, based on the standards of large-scale distribution and new uses of the city.
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