Ronald Chammah, who owns a couple of small cinemas on the left bank of Paris, well remembers the dark days of 2022, when he wondered if French passion for movies – fun that France invented 130 years ago – they were irreversibly reduced by pandemic lock.
But that was then. In the last afternoon, Mr. Chammah was sitting in a crowded Paris cafe, happily describing Sunday in late November, when he sold out screenings from the list of director of Armenian art houses-inna Mkhitrayan, Actavazd Pelehian, Sergueï Paradjanov-Knowing mostly with stubborn films.
“We knocked the record for our theaters that day,” Mr. Chammah said with astonishment. “He was full, all day – sold out, sold out.”
Global movie job had and disappointing 2024Part thanks to Hollywood blows. At Oscar on Sunday, Sean Baker, the winner of the best director for “Anora”, used his speech about accepting to lament the loss of hundreds of American film screens from the pandemic era. “And we continue to lose them regularly,” Mr. Baker said. “If we don’t turn this trend back, we’ll lose a vital part of our culture.”
But in France there was a late celebrated feeling, and fresh statistics suggest that his audience leads the way to returning to what is loved as “Les Salles darkening” – The “dark rooms” of their cinemas.
This celebration is imbued with a very French idea of the moral obligation of citizens to support art and do so somewhere other than home. The Lumière Institute, the Lyon’s headquarters, stated that last year’s number of French admission was a triumph because of a pandemic era and an “invasive digital civilization” movement and overturning.
“We know that more than ever: going to the cinema remains unique, unique, valuable,” the UE institute wrote to supporters. “Personal, physically, sentimental. Allows you to re -applied a way of existence in a world that can never prevent anything.”
According to Comscore’s data companies, France was one of the few countries that increased the attendance of cinema in China last year, with more than 181 million participants, which is almost almost a million. Brazil, Britain and Turkey have also recorded an increase, said Eric Marta, Comscore CEO in France. But he said that the numbers of attendance were reduced in every other European country as well as in the United States.
At the same time, however, the revenues of the coffers in the world have been increased, according to a recent report On Global Media, in PricewaterhouseCoopers, they are likely to surpass their over -inflammatory levels until next year. This is mainly because people who go to the cinema in developed countries pay more for top quality experience, even if they go less often, said David Hancock, an analyst at Omdia’s research company.
But Mr. Hancock said that the French public attitude towards films and cinemas as a whole is something different. “It’s almost mystical,” he said.
The idea of a French capital as a concentrated locus of obsessive cinephilia is one of those clichés in Baguette-Pod-Ruke that in fact also has a basis. China has long contributed to the city landscape and still do it.
The locking of the pandemic was closed by French cinemas for 300 total days in 2020 and 2021. In Paris, only a comparable period may have been in 1940, when the progress of the German army brought people to escape from the city, which encouraged the widespread temporary closure of the cinema.
In today’s Paris, it can feel like a pandemic has never happened. At the Le Chambo Theater, fans appear for the retrospective series on Satyajit Ray and Frank Capra. At the Art House MK2 Theater chain, they attend the conversations of sociologists, art historians and philosophers. In November, Jeu de Pauma, a museum dedicated to photography and contemporary art, opened the cinema focused on art films and documentary films.
Two months earlier, the Pathé film company opened its palace of seven screens in the Grands Boulevards building imbued with cinema history. The celebrated architect Renzo Piano addressed the renewal.
“Many people in the world have buried the cinema and think television has definitely eliminated him,” said Jérôme Seydoux, President of Pathé, at the time of renovation. Mr. Seydoux called the project “Reasonable craziness, a setting to greet all the dreams of this world.”
Some of these lasting passions can be because many Paris apartments are too small to adapt to large home time settings. The French film industry likes to withstand another explanation, with a spritz of unskilled and a swagger drop.
In a statement, the National Center for Film and Movable Pictures, or CNC, French Government Film Agency, has launched an industry recovery from pandemic to “the artistic and industrial excellence of our cultural exceptions”, a national policy reference that was to promote and protect French culture.
Olivier Henrard, who until recently was a temporary CNC president, went deeper.
“We haven’t forgotten,” he said in an interview, “that citizenship designed In the theater, from the time of Greek. “
Mr. Henrard noted that he was France “cultural exception“The model supports the habit of film, with an educational curriculum that includes subsidized trips to movies for millions of school children.
Government supports tiny movie houses in smaller cities, while some of the most famous villages regularly Receive visits from the associations that have set up temporary screenings in schools and city councilors.
France requires that the first starting films to be checked exclusively in French cinemas four months before going to the video and CNC oversees a complex system of ticket taxes and fees from TV channels and the service of streaming videos filtered into film production.
This created the feeling that going to movies fulfills his type of social contract.
Mr. Chammah, the owner of the cinema – who is also a film producer and distributor, and the husband of French film star Isabelle Huppert – claimed that after Paris Pandemi, he still offered the most impressive range of cinefile choices.
“That’s the best, because there is this choice,” he said.
Still, CNC noted that attending French cinema is almost 13 percent below the level before the pandemic. And in recent years Paris recorded the closure of a few Esteemed film houses.
But Axel Huyghe, author and expert in the French filmmaking, see hope, especially in numerous restorations of iconic film places, either recently completed or ongoing. “The cinema industry is in the renovation process,” he said.
La Pagoda, a false-Japanese fantasy of enamelled stone and stained glass in the seventh Arrondissement, manifests that hope. Once one of the most important city cinemas, he closed in 2015 in the middle of a bitter dispute for rent. Now it seems under the renovation, at a narrow Rue de Babilone, like a brave descent of dreams, connected in an otherwise stal of a row of buildings.
Over the street, Yohann Lucian, who works at a local bistro, observes the progress of the renovation. When the theater is finally open, Mr. Lucian said, he is sure that the movie players will return.
“For the Parisians, it’s a way of life,” he said, with an indication of his shoulders. “They like to go to the movies.”
