VIDEO. The future of cinema according to director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau

“Today, we can only hope and fight, because I am very afraid of the loss of cinema, of the cinema medium, which is linked to the cinema”. For Julia Ducournau, the cinema is in danger, a problem accelerated with the Covid-19 pandemic where consumers have become accustomed to watching films and series from their telephone or computer. And all the activities that the user undertakes, in parallel with watching the film, such as eating or telephoning, make their experience less rooted in the present. “Cinema is an experience of communion, of sensoriality, with a whole work on sound, the immense image, of oneself, in one’s existence, in one’s body and in the now. Above all, it is an experience of the now. Whereas on a computer, it’s not an experience of the present but a bit more regressive”. According to her, it is useless to put the computer and the cinema in rivalry because we have “need both” to meet very different needs.

Move the “creative gesture”

According to the director, moving the medium on a platform or a screen impacts “the creative gesture”. “Not all filmmakers think like me, I have the impression that it displaces the creative gesture. That is to say, we simply think more in the same way”. Because for these professionals, the sound work will be very different if the work is broadcast in a cinema rather than on a small screen. “Even if there are people who can afford very sophisticated stuff, and good for them, but we’re talking about a minority all the same. So, today, I tell myself that, yes, the cinema medium is in danger”, explains the filmmaker.