In recent years, Cannes has become a bastion of small-c conservatism when it comes to cinema. Since 2018, organisers of the world’s most famous film festival have refused to allow Netflix films to compete for its Palme D’Or, and railed against the attritional impact of streaming on traditional movie-going. If a film is not going to be shown in French cinemas, and given a three-year theatrical window before going online, it won’t be seen at Cannes. This year, the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, took a veiled swipe at rival showcases such as Venice and Berlin, which have welcomed the digital disrupters. “Some festivals were first to open their doors a bit too freely,” he noted testily, “to people of whom we are not sure if they actually want cinema to survive.”
Such doom-mongering may be a little overdone. After a catastrophic Covid-hit 2020 for cinema, and a lost summer on the Croisette, this year’s edition of the festival – which ends on Saturday – has been a stirring success. There has been critical acclaim for new films by Wes Anderson and the British director Joanna Hogg, and a stunning English-language debut from the Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. A succès de scandale from the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven generated gratifying headlines. The overall quality on show more than demonstrated that cinema is “not dead”, as Mr Frémaux put it at the festival’s outset. But it is understandable that those who treasure its traditions are feeling a little insecure. As the pandemic drove populations indoors, film studios have rushed to develop their own streaming services, and many more movies are now made without a big-screen release in mind.
The prospect of subscription models dwarfing box office receipts as a source of income for studios is spooking both cinephiles and cinema chains. In a recent essay on the films of Federico Fellini, the great American director Martin Scorsese took aim at the way streaming platforms package movies up with other kinds of “content” to be consumed on demand. “The art of cinema,” he wrote, is “being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content’.” There are legitimate concerns that the need to justify subscription fees prioritises quantity over quality, and that the tyranny of the algorithm encourages the production of formulaic genre fare. But The Irishman, Mr Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour gangster epic, was a Netflix film, as was the magnificent Roma, by Alfonso Cuarón, which was banned from Cannes but won the Golden Lion at Venice and three Oscars.
A balance must be struck. There must always be a place for the collective and immersive nature of the big-screen experience and studios and streaming platforms should do what they can to give traditional cinemas the space to breathe and flourish; not every film needs to be immediately available online. But Spike Lee, a jury president at Cannes, was right to point out that the demise of cinema was wrongly predicted in the early days of television. As Mr Lee said: “Cinema and screening platforms can coexist.” Here’s to a successful Venice festival in September.
• This article was amended on 17 July 2021. Paul Verhoeven is Dutch rather than Belgian as an earlier version said.
