In 2018, the film-maker Paul Schrader made some controversial remarks about how the business has changed since his 1970s heyday, when he wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the 70s as some halcyon period,” Schrader said at a Bafta Screenwriters event in London. “There’s probably, in fact, more talented film-makers today than there was in the 70s. What there was in the 70s was better audiences.” The director added, “We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously, so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them.”
Looking back just five years later, Schrader’s words seem like a grim portent of an era when art films and character-driven dramas struggle to find an audience in cinemas. Though much of the blame lies with the major studios and entertainment companies, who’ve all but eliminated risk and originality from theatrical releases, the pandemic also got viewers hooked on streaming instead of movie-going.
I thought of the First Reformed director’s words recently, when a report emerged from France’s Cour des Comptes (court of auditors) calling for an “in-depth reform of aid” provided to French cinema. The report’s statistics tell a bleak story about the state of European arthouse cinema – and French film-making in particular. According to the commission, a third of French films released in 2019 attracted fewer than 20,000 viewers in movie theatres. More dismally, the report finds that only 2% of French films are profitable during their theatrical run.
Its conclusions could imperil the system of French “cultural exception” – the notion that cinema and other arts should be sheltered from the forces of market capitalism – that has long provided public subsidies for France’s film industry – amounting to nearly €700m a year (a modest sum in the grand scheme of things). The court warns against “an ever-increasing number of productions being financed”, raising the spectre of profitability becoming a factor in determining which projects get funded.
For French cinema to be sacrificed on the altar of market forces would be an incalculable loss. The vast influence of the French art film over the last century of film history can’t be reduced to box office figures. Looking back to the silent era, the modern historical epic wouldn’t exist without Abel Gance’s staggering, five-hour Napoléon (1927), while surrealist film-makers (and rock group the Pixies) owe a mighty debt to Luis Buñuel’s chilling Un Chien Andalou (1929).
The emergence of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s didn’t just result in masterpieces like Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962). It transformed the visual vocabulary of film-making, making room for jump cuts, freeze frames and new modes of subjectivity, techniques that have influenced everyone from Martin Scorsese to Noah Baumbach and been widely integrated into mass-market movies of every genre. The New Wave directors also perfected the art of working on low budgets, carving out an alternative to the studio system and building the groundwork for independent film movements to come.
Yes, but that was 60 years ago, critics may retort. That French cinema still matters is demonstrated by noteworthy and bold films from the last decade that confront taboo subjects rarely explored in Hollywood productions. Those include lesbian desire (2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour), the resilience of Aids activism (2017’s 120 Battements Par Minute), mechanophilia (2021’s Titane), and explicit homoerotic sexuality (Passages, the buzzy new French film directed by American film-maker Ira Sachs).
Should France’s cultural support be eroded, the present state of moviegoing in the States should serve as a warning. Try visiting a multiplex outside major markets like New York or Los Angeles, and corporate-moulded franchise movies are often your only option. That’s a problem not because such movies are unanimously bad (though often they are), but because, as Martin Scorsese argued in 2019, they are “perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption”, lacking in “the unifying vision of an individual artist”. What’s gone is the excitement, the risk, of seeing something new. The cinema becomes a theme park rather than a site of discovery.
Over the last four years, the situation has got worse. In 2022, the New York Times reported that highbrow, character-driven films – from Todd Field’s eerie, ambiguous Tár to Steven Spielberg’s highly personal The Fabelmans – were struggling to recoup their budgets at the box office. Too many moviegoers, it seems, became accustomed to streaming from their couch during lockdown, and now only venture out to the cinema for an “event” movie – say, a Marvel film, an Avatar sequel or a Barbenheimer-level cultural phenomenon. Arthouse films and mid-budget dramas get neglected.
It would be comforting to think streaming can pick up what’s lost. But great films, whether directed by Claire Denis or an unknown, deserve to be seen on the big screen.
Besides, most streaming services are simply too beholden to the almighty algorithm. Last spring, for instance, the British film-maker Dexter Fletcher said he had wanted his Apple TV+ film Ghosted to have an extended opening sequence of the main character driving through a mountain. But, Apple TV+ executives nixed the idea because “the data shows that people will just turn [it] off”.
In a world where culture has been ravaged by capitalism and assembly-line streaming “content”, this remains the promise of the European arthouse picture: movies governed by curiosity and artistry rather than data. It’s the least audiences deserve.
Zach Schonfeld is a freelance journalist and critic based in New York
