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Critics’ notebook
In the midst of considerations about the long term of cinemas, don’t forget that the afterlife has not been glorious, it’s time to reconsider what you need in a movie.
By A. O. Scott
Will cinema be the pandemic? Consultation is trivial (there are actually more serious issues to worry about) and unduly apocalyptic. After all, cinemas have reopened in many parts of the country, and other people went to see “Tenet” last month. not as much as Warner Bros. , he had waited, and little to start the fall movie season under a pessimistic cloud.
Lately, the news has become darker. On October 5, Regal Cinemas, the largest showroom of the time in the United States, announced that it would temporarily close its more than 500 cinemas. Studios have driven the most of their 2020 Holiday outings in 2021, for now, and last week, Disney. announced that Pixar’s new role, “Soul,” scheduled for theaters in June, would debut on Disney’s broadcast platform in December, without overlooking the multiplexes.
This news was a kind of teaser for the corporate blocker that came Monday: the announcement of a restructuring at Disney that, in the words of CEO Bob Chapek, would mean “managing the creation of content separate from distribution”. Our artistic “Teams,” Chapek explained based on poetry, “will focus on what they do with maximum productivity (creating world-class franchise-based entertainment), while our newly centralized global distribution team will focus on delivering and monetizing this content in the most optimal way across all platforms. »
These words do not accurately pronounce a death sentence for cinemas, yet they express a basic indifference to their future. As theaters survive, Disney will locate screens and viewers. Netflix, which is releasing some of its premieres in 2020 theaters, has built a subscription empire. confidence that other people would also stay at home temporarily and move on to alpassritmo. Together, these two corporations are an increasing percentage of global attention span, and their successful development can only awaken worrying minds in viewers’ minds.
What if the pandemic, instead of representing a transient disruption of audience behavior and industry revenue, turned out to be an occasion for extinction for films?What if, now that we’re used to watching videos in our living rooms or laptops, we lose our appetite for the pleasure of running down the upholstered aisles, dragging loose popcorn kernels and rocks giant Coca-Cola Zero cups, pushing us down a seat in the hallway and hoping that all this soda doesn’t mean we’re going to have to run to the bathroom the big sequence of action?
The specter of empty movie theaters haunted Hollywood (and the press that covers it) long before the Covid-19 plot twisted. In recent years, ticket price sales have been solid or declining, an malaise masked through seasonal giants like episodes of the Avengers “saga or chapters of the third” Star Wars “trilogy – through the Disney’s tough market share, in other words. And even the periodic triumphs of non-franchisees, or at least not Disney’s – “Get Out” and “Joker”; “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “American Sniper” were slight gusts of wind. in the sails of a stuck schooner, or teacups of water drawn from the hull of an ocean liner, or some other disastrous nautical metaphor.
However, the final disaster seemed unthinkable, and for good reason: the history of cinema is, in its component, an anthology of unwelcome obituaries. The sound, the color, the television, the suburbs, the VCR, the Internet: they were all going to kill the movies, and none of them made it. The cultural bureaucracy and social and personal rituals that they have a way of surviving their funerals. How many times have we heard of the death of the novel?Poetry?Rock n Roll? The arts of the fashion age may seem like a parade of exquisite corpses. The dead don’t die.
Perhaps no art form has been remade as dramatically in a life as short as cinema (which technically speaking is no longer even a film). For more than a hundred years, “going to the cinema” has encompassed many other tactics to leave home, and a corresponding variety of destinations: carnival kiosks with curtains; giant palaces with gilded ceilings and velvet seats; Jewels and Roxys in the main streets of small towns; suburban autocine and multi-screen shopping center; Grindhouses, art houses, repertory houses and porn salons. More recently, in reaction to the daunting similarity of megaplexes, a new type of gentred cinema has emerged, with reserved seating, catering and craft cocktails delivered to your seat.
So why are we crying? A common response, presented either through those who care about movies dying or those who insist they can’t, it’s the community, the thrill of sitting in the dark between friends and strangers and participating in a collective dream. ideological, if not completely ideological, a fantasy of cinematic democracy is rarely performed.
Did you purchase your price ticket online or did the site refuse your credit card?Did you line up to find out what you were looking for to see that you were exhausted?Did you kick the back of your seat?Elderly people talking? Or, perhaps worse, did you stand, one night of the week, a few weeks after the start of an almost well-reviewed success, still alone in the dark?
Was the floor sticky?Was there a mask on the edge of the screen or did the symbol just sink into the curtains?Was the sound clear?
These were not unusual court cases for movie lovers in the pre-pandemic era, and we deserve not to get carried away by the nostalgia of this moment. disorders went beyond lax control or technological disorders.
The problem, to return to Chapek’s memorandum, “world-class franchise-based entertainment,” not all examples, but the patterns of creation and admission imposed by the concept. The big movie theater chains were kept alive through Disney, which ruled the homework box with ever-increasing margins, and seemed almost only capable of generating the kind of big occasions that can attract the masses on the opening weekend. These films, distributed every two months or so, have raised money expectations among operators and helped break the habit of normal movie attendance among audiences. There is less and less space, literally fewer rooms, but also less collective bandwidth, for entertainment outside the franchise.
At least at the multiplex level. The movie didn’t go away, it broke. Some stayed at home, now that the original cinema, not the prestigious television, but the restored classics and new works through consecrated authors, can be discovered in streaming. I live through new corporations like A24 and Neon, which have distributed Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite. “
The photographs were, in many respects, getting smaller: a little less expensive to make and less dependent on mass popularity, but it is also true that some of the most attractive films of the last half decade, especially in languages other than English, were suffering to locate screens and oxygen.
Movie theater closures have accelerated this trend, at least for the time being. In the absence of box office successes, ambitious little films have given the impression of fungi in a forest, symptoms of life amid the general decomposition, but fragile and fragile. too gently overlooked or trampled.
Will the return of independent cinemas, numerous, help these little films survive?, treating theaters as a kind of leader for their lucrative subscription services?
But maybe it’s wrong. Making predictions, besides being stupid, is an expression of passivity, an acceptance of our small role as consumers of culture. Instead of asking us what can happen, what would happen if we had an idea of what we need and not of ourselves. as enthusiasts or subscribers, but as partners and participants?
I’ll see you at the movies.
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