Tribune. At the time of the end credits, before the lights come back on, some timid applause, soon joined by others, without triggering either. of general outburst. Because there are not that many of us in the theater… The scene has been reproduced during numerous cinema sessions since the theaters reopened. I watched it and participated in it at the end of films as different as Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), To die can wait (Cary Joji Fukunaga), The divide (Catherine Corsini), and Stand up women! (François Ruffin) – which naturally leads to applause.
Do spectators applaud the pleasure of being in a movie theater, a place banned for many months because of the Covid-19 pandemic? That of sharing the experience of a film with others? Or to finally see the credits scroll in full? The companionship experienced in the cinema is being reinvented. To meet in a dark room in the company of strangers, to share the vision of the same film, even with the mask and the sanitary pass, that was lacking!
Fear of crowded places
We are all the more upset to learn from the Harris survey on the French and post-crisis cultural outings (conducted between August 31 and September 3, 2021) that they have not found their way back to the cinema (only 41% have returned) and above all, do not intend to resume it anytime soon. A large third also plan to reduce their cinema releases by the end of the year. The reasons most often cited are the fear of too crowded places… and the preference now for digital content (less available for “live shows” than for cinema).
“We must not neglect the rupture constituted by this globalized confinement, the magnitude and the irreversibility of the change in our cultural habits”
It is all the more striking that, according to this survey, it is most often the cinephiles who have unlearned to go to the cinema, those who frequent the dark rooms regularly return there the least, preferring from now on the framework of their house to see films. films so readily available and for less (although…).
The film seems to have joined the domestic space, like the series, of which we have seen to what extent they were associated with withdrawal at home, a consequence of confinement, during which they played the role of security blanket or shrink. The intense reception of the series In therapy, by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, is one example among others of this privatization of cultural life which could be a radical modification of those lives where we went to the cinema.
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