At the very start of its mandate, the Express think tank is formulating its proposals for reforming the country without delay. Ideas in which, you never know, the tenant of the Elysée could draw to enrich his project.
“France is the Vatican of cinema, it is a very dogmatic country! […] In France, it is easy to make bad films and very difficult to make good ones. We are committed to defending the diversity of films as much as possible. But it is the consumers who choose and people do not go to see films where they are bored.” Jérôme Seydoux, president of the Pathé group, granted an interview to our colleagues from Figaro, during which, with a beautiful and frank lucidity, he x-rays production and distribution in French cinema. One might be shocked by his words, but that would be hiding behind a tired ideology. The reality is that France produces far too many films that do not find their audience. If the system worked so well, it was because the actors of culture were subversive, free personalities, and not civil servants of the arts, who wrote and directed not the film they would like to see, but the one that fills all the boxes of diversity, which whines on all ranges of good feelings, all to be sure to receive the essential subsidies.
If, when it comes to the construction site of culture, I insist on the cinema, it is because we indeed have a system that is not only efficient economically but also socially – as we have been able to observe during the successive confinements when France was the only European country not to abandon culture.
On the other hand, the issue of film production and distribution is intertwined with that of streaming platforms. Cinemas have lost 20% of attendance since the Covid and it is unlikely that spectators will return, now chained to their individual screens. Let’s anticipate the transformation of movie theaters before they file for bankruptcy by transforming them into more prestigious, more comfortable places where one goes as one would go to the opera. Let’s not block our noses in front of an inevitable evolution – like when cinemas introduced the system of subscription cards already supposed to kill cinema and install moribund neoliberalism at the heart of French creation.
Let’s anticipate, propose, envision the future without pouting backwards. Let’s not let the cinema be in the image of its representatives, like Xavier Beauvois (director of eight multi-subsidized feature films, between 1991 and 2021, therefore under right-wing and left-wing governments) who is not happy with the second round poster. To show his opposition, he burned his voter card. There is always something touching in the petty-bourgeois rebellion, this childish way, with a full stomach and a roof over your head, of stamping your feet because the little train is red and you wanted a black one. Let’s not leave the world of culture in the hands of the past and postures!