If a director allowed himself to be inspired by the crisis in cinema, he would certainly give birth to a disaster film.
The pandemic has weighed on cinema attendance everywhere. Data shows that with 95.5 million admissions in 2021, French cinemas have their worst score in a century. He had sold 110 million cinema tickets in 1925.
The decline was clearly visible before the health crisis (138 million tickets only in 2019) and the recovery is not coming this year (less than 100 million tickets between January and August).
The grim observation remains with the number of admissions per inhabitant. The average French person went to the cinema 10 times in 1946, then 2 or 3 since the arrival of television sixty years ago. We were at 1.5 tickets per citizen in 2021, another sad record.
The figures for Quebec seem less devastating, but they also indicate a deep crisis here. Attendance calculated by the Culture Observatory fell from 21.1 million admissions in 2021, to 18.7 in 2019 and then to 7 million in 2021.
Last week, in Deauville, where theater operators met in congress, the Minister of Culture of France, Rima Abdul-Malak, spoke bluntly of a “civilizational challenge for our societies and for our democracies”. Nothing less. The disaster film would therefore turn into a post-apocalyptic tragedy…
Marcel Jean, director of the Cinémathèque québécoise, does not act in this darkened production. “It’s going very well for us,” he said when told about the general slump. It’s almost embarrassing to say it in a context where it’s difficult for some. But we are very nested. I often say that we are the niche of the niche. »
General plan
Marcel Jean has been directing the Cinémathèque for almost eight years and the programming of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France for ten. After his master’s degree in art history, he made a few films (including Critical state), much written (including the Dictionary of Quebec cinema with Michel Coulombe), taught at the University of Montreal, directed the documentary program of the National Institute of Image and Sound, piloted the NFB Animation Studio and founded his own production company. He was even a film critic at To have to (nobody is perfect).
In short, the seventh art, he knows. “Cinema in turn is suffering the effects of the great digitization which has completely transformed the music sector,” he says. This is worrying if we take the point of view of an economic player in the community. People have lost their jobs. Venues will close. And those that we will build in the future are likely to be different. »
The Cinéma Moderne du Plateau Mont-Royal sets the example, but in the equivalent of the Salle Fred-Barry at the theatre. In France, the independent network Utopia, developed for decades, has thirty rooms present in six cities.
“I don’t want to defend movie theaters whose business model is based on selling popcorn sold at 900% profit,” says Jean. We’ve built cinema complexes aimed at one type of audience, I would say the adolescent male, also offering hot dogs, nachos, arcades and superhero movies. Afterwards, we are surprised that part of the public says to themselves: “I am still at home to see films or watch television series”. »
For him the question is not more to be for or against the platforms: they are there, of which act. We will not abolish them and he himself, who consumes a lot of films in theaters, also sees a lot of them at home, on his computer, on planes. The timeline and interactions of outings also change. Blonde hair, by Andrew Dominik, broadcast on Netflix and the documentary I salute you bitches, by Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist, continue to work well in a room at the Cinémathèque.
“We are not going to be a veteran and redo the Spanish war, concludes director Jean. You have to look at what the new platforms bring, positive and negative. That they attack the functioning of traditional industry, that is clear. But they have also made it possible to open up the financing of certain very daring productions. Rome was hard to do before Netflix backed it. Tea Power of the Dog, it is also real cinema. »
Depth of field
His establishment operates two rooms, one with 85 seats and one with 150. The first does more in art and testing. The other program features classics in original formats (35 mm) sometimes silent cinema with live pianist. The average attendance for screenings is above 40%, which remains excellent since, according to a law of the environment, the rooms are too small on Saturday evening and too large on Monday afternoon.
“We have a lot of success with films that are nevertheless available everywhere”, continues the director. Taxi Driver Where Elephant fill the rooms and, for about half, by moviegoers under 35 who already know the works they want to see again in optimal conditions. “When we did the Cronenberg retrospective, some screenings were digital and I saw young people turn back because they wanted to see the 35mm print. »
Hence the importance of accumulating it. Legal deposit has only existed since 2006 in Quebec, while national cinematography, practically non-existent until the 1950s, exploded thereafter. The archives of this prosperous period are now ready to be taken, and the Cinémathèque opens its spaces to it.
When a warehouse closed in Lyon, the Cinémathèque recovered dozens of new reels, Godards and European productions (seven by Manoel de Oliveira), Japanese or Korean, all also subtitled. The curators also unearthed the negatives and prints of photos of stars taken at major festivals in the apartment of photographer Pierino Di Tonno.
Distributor Seville donated 1,300 copies with French subtitles of works by Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai and Gus Van Sant, as well as Quebec films. Collector François Lemai handed over hundreds of Soviet and Eastern European films accumulated during the Cold War by Claire Custom, former director of Ouimetoscope. The director and his programming director took advantage of the public closures during the pandemic to have one or two works from this fund screened a day. In the dining room, as it should be…