To analyse. No doubt, arthouse cinema has suffered so much as it does today in France. Since May 2021, and particularly since the introduction of the health pass, on July 21, it is estimated that the overall attendance has fallen by 20% to 30% compared to 2019. If this situation affects all films, those with great spectacle s ‘come out better, while auteur cinema, which has not found its audience, is no longer paying for it.
If nothing proves that this disaffection is final, if we can hope that the cinema-going public will one day find their way back to the theaters, it is certain that the hypothesis of a more or less inexorable decline, not to speak of ‘an announced death, is now interfering in some minds.
We can therefore only be deeply struck by the repetition of the motif of the last endings and death, in recent months, in French cinema. Even though these films would have been started before the crisis linked to the pandemic. Casting its shadow on the occasion of an accident, an examination, an incurable disease, death instills there, in the more general picture of a fractured and tormented France, an endgame atmosphere.
Film and project the infigurable
This recurrence does not go without saying, however, from the simple point of view of representation. It is never easy, in the cinema, to portray illness or death. How to film decline, disfigurement, disappearance, nothingness face to face? How can this art of the visible and the presence that is cinema look the invisible and silent worker in the face? How even, as the critic André Bazin (1918-1958) recalled, claim to film and project this infigurable, this unique and non-reproducible moment among all, which is the passage from life to death? In order to evoke it, do we have to accompany the dead or to testify in the company of the living?
To be honest, few movies get out of these dilemmas. It takes courage, determination, a taste for risk and the abyss of which only the greatest artistic gestures are capable. See in particular Carl Theodor Dreyer (Ordet, 1955), Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers, 1973), Maurice Pialat (Mouth open, 1974), Abbas Kiarostami (The Taste of Cherry, 1997), Frederick Wiseman (Near Death, 1989).
The films in question here are much more comfortable. They are all, without false shame, resolutely on the side of life, which is never more than the side from which each of us, weak mortal, as he can take it. We count here, in order of appearance, DNA, by Maïwenn (October 2020); The Father, by Florian Zeller (April 2021); Everything went well, by François Ozon (September 2021); The divide, by Catherine Corsini (October 2021); In his lifetime, by Emmanuel Bercot (November 2011).
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