Amid all the dire news to come out of the movie business this year – a box office slump, a slowdown of production, growing unemployment in Hollywood, the closure of a dozen cinemas in the UK – good news seems to have come from the unlikeliest of places: cinephilia, pronounced “dead” by Susan Sontag in 1996, is alive and well and sporting a Mubi tote bag among the very demographic, 18- to 25-year-olds, whose gif-shortened attention spans are usually held up as spelling the death of the medium.
A recent Wim Wenders retrospective including Wings of Desire and The American Friend took £225,700 at the box office – more than double its distributor, Curzon, expected. A North American rerelease of Chen Kaige’s 1993 Palme d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine grossed $350,000. Even a recent retrospective of the auteur’s auteur, melancholy Hungarian Béla Tarr – including the seven-hour Sátántangó – took £65,000. What makes these figures all the more surprising is that these films are readily available to audiences on DVD, BFI Player, the Criterion channel or other home entertainment companies such as Vinegar Syndrome. Even more surprising is the demographic they are succeeding with: a recent 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, took almost $7m in its 2023 re-release by A24, with three-quarters of audiences seeing it in a cinema for the first time and more than 60% of its audience not yet born when the film was released in 1984.
