In times of media oversupply, linear television, video streaming platforms and social networks are struggling for viewers’ attention. The integration of content from TV channels on streaming platforms ensures further integration in the media offering. YouTube USA, for example, has started making TV channels with films and TV series with advertisements available to users free of charge. In this mixed situation, however, the cinema in particular has a difficult position.
Total cinema audiences in Europe and North America have been declining for decades. German cinema experienced its peak in the 1960s. Thanks to price increases and multiplex cinemas, the industry has been able to keep its overall sales largely constant so far, and the cinema boom in Asia also helped to slow down the downward trend. But Corona upset this deceptive balance. Sales fell by around 70 percent. In Germany and the USA it was still possible, not least thanks to generous state aid, to largely avoid closures, at least for smaller cinemas. But the world’s largest operator, AMC, with around 10,000 cinemas, only stayed afloat with bridging loans and may be facing bankruptcy. It’s the same with other chains.
This text first appeared in issue 1/2022 of MIT Technology Review under the title “Swimming against the stream” (order in the heise shop). We publish it freely readable here.
What has become of cinema as a cultural venue?
“We are dealing with a structural crisis in cinema,” says Lars Henrik Gass, head of Oberhausen Short Film Festival, “not a temporary one caused by the pandemic.” As early as 2017, Stefan Paul, operator of the “Arsenal” cinema in Tübingen, sounded the alarm: “We have simply lost the younger generation.” Even in its culture-oriented city, the cinema as a cultural venue “bypasses the student body”.
Changing habits, emerging streaming services, and now Corona – something like a perfect storm seems to be brewing over the cinema industry. From the beginning, however, the history of cinema felt like one of being declared dead. Filmmakers and critics already saw the beginnings of “talking film” as a disenchantment: “filmed theatre”, media scientist Rudolf Arnheim railed at the time; he only considered the silent film to be cinematic art in its purest form.
At the same time, the omission of piano accompaniment or even live orchestras changed the experience character of the cinema. At first it seemed set up to dig the water out of theatre, opera and concerts, but it soon found itself under pressure. The cinema newsreel increasingly had to compete with other news media such as radio and television, later video cassettes, DVDs and Blu-rays were added.
