HASith 152 million spectators in 2022, a less bad year than announced but only three quarters of the figures before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world of cinema continues to wonder about its future. The decliners identify the culprits, the price of tickets, competition from platforms, the poor quality of films, their overabundance, the loss of habit linked to the epidemic…
The optimists affirm, on the contrary, that the cinema, which has overcome multiple crises, has not said its last word; they proclaim their love of the auditorium and, on top of the classic opposition between art, which must be defended, and industry, which one should be wary of, they superimpose that between the auditorium, an incomparable place for sharing and meeting the audience with the works, and the other screens, pale copies of the original, where undifferentiated “content” surges without any reference to art history.
A common economy
That it is essential to preserve the presence of demanding films, coming from diversified horizons, in cinemas, by multiplying meetings, putting them into perspective, by offering tools allowing a detailed knowledge of the public is not debatable. But to think that this will be enough to ensure the future of all cinemas and all creators who dream of telling stories and telling the world from their own point of view is a totally chimerical vision.
As long as we accept to take a lucid look at the economy of the sector, another duality is essential, neither that between art and industry nor that between large and small screens, but that between two elements which constitute the common base of what is called “cinema”, the place on the one hand, the singularity of a film, artistic object on the other hand.
From the beginning of the XXe century, and for a few decades, the creation of singular films and their distribution in a place, the room, developed in a common economy and dissociating these two aspects would have seemed incongruous. From the end of the 1950s, the theater lost its monopoly on the distribution of films in favor of television; other forms of audiovisual production are emerging, whose artistic qualities sometimes have nothing to envy to certain cinema “films”.
But, despite the proliferation of screens, despite the diversity of productions, an economic solidarity between the film and the room continued to exist. The movie theater continued to evolve to face competition from other screens, but the heart of its economy remained devoted to film. The cinema film, while being financed and paying off massively outside of cinemas, found its artistic legitimacy in cinemas thanks to filters such as criticism or passage through festivals.
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