22/11/2010

At Europa Cinemas annual conference, held in Paris from November 18-21, economist Olivier Bomsel offered a few avenues for thinking about digital, movie theatres and Europe. Below are some selected extracts.

Will digital change the function of movie theatres?
Olivier Bomsel: What may change is that digital will erase the specificity of films and enable theatres to screen other content. Plans by major exhibitor groups to show opera in theatres poses a fundamental problem for the identity of cinema. For theatres have a symbolic significance: they transform a file, a scene, a message into a work of art. The fact that these churches dedicated to a single cult, that of cinema, are opening up to other cults poses a problem for coexistence. For the competition between cinema and other forms of narrative is very intense. For example, young audiences have access to fictional works on television. Will movie theatres be tempted to show series?

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

As the first communication system combining private correspondence and publication, the Internet has given rise to new and hybrid forms. We’ve thus forgotten the great symbolic power of publication. We’ve heard that everyone can be an author, a creator. However, when you address an anonymous audience, you ought to get approval from a certain number of parties. It’s not just about filtering and selection, but also authorisation. Movie theatres authorise the film, identify its director as a director. And at a time when everyone can make images, this function is crucial. For a teenager, going out of the house is a meaningful act and going to the cinema is a powerful act which has a completely different dimension to chatting on Facebook.

How can theatres retain this mission of giving a seal of approval to films?
Viewers buy an experience whose principle is that you only measure its usefulness after consumption. Distributing experiences means constantly running the risk of engendering disappointment. Editorialising means building a relationship of trust with viewers by enabling them to assess their risk as well as possible, to best understand the movie theatre’s editorial policy. It’s about becoming an approved label, like a collection of books or a wine appellation. The proposed film must be consistent with the proposed policy.

Are Europe and its diversity adapted to the digital economy?
Large, single-language countries have enormous comparative advantages because their market is bigger and as their successes are greater, they can take more risks in production. They can create powerful brands: the whole star system stems from this and helps reduce consumers’ risks. The European Union is made up of 27 countries and 23 languages: this is a major economic handicap not only because of the size of the markets, but also because of the cost of adapting products from one country to another. Europe was built on the idea of a unified market to produce economies of scale. But European civil servants have difficulty understanding that there are no economies of scale for the media market and that, on the contrary, strengthening this market requires considerable investment.

Digital euphoria gave the impression that experiences could circulate. However, an industry that is structurally handicapped in international competition should have an industrial policy up to the job. We need to train a generation of viewers to watch films in their original version to avoid adaptation costs. For digital helps the flow of circulation, but language barriers shouldn’t be underestimated. And if we don’t prove capable of interesting European consumers in a Swedish actor, for example, there will be big problems.