Some ideas to postpone the end of the cinema — An exercise in anticipation

Like all forms of life, cinema is heading for extinction. Before its extinction – like all forms of life – it will survive, adapt and move on. Where will it be in ten years’ time? And where will we be, our desires and our means? An advertisement from the 1970s, in the midst of the energy crisis, boasted: ‘If they deprive us of petrol, we’ll always have cinema’. But as a child of industrial modernity fed on supposedly unlimited energy, cinema is proving to be vulnerable to the pressures generated by ecological crises and the sometimes drastic transformations of our living environments.

In a first text published in issue 34 of the Revue Documentaires – a real fake document that will have been written some ten years from now – we raised the question of future distribution in the midst of climatic upheavals, commercial manoeuvres and institutional transformations.

What, then, will be happening to creation in ten years’ time? This morning session will provide an opportunity to start imagining and discussing the answers to such a question.

We want to engage in a collective exercise in anticipation, speculating on the cinemas of the 2030s by manipulating the materials of today and the day before yesterday. Making films that consume less energy, that are less industrial? Making films that nourish social relations, words and affects that are non-fascist and non-imperialist? Making or sharing fewer images, recycling them? Invent new public policies or emancipate ourselves from them through autonomous tactics? Defend intellectual property or a guaranteed income? And again: how will the cinematographic form position itself between the economy of the brevity of stories and that of the length of series? What credits will we write? What will be left of the author relationship?

Moderated by : Jacopo Rasmi, lecturer in visual arts, University of Saint-Etienne

In the presence of :

• Gwenola Wagon, teacher-researcher, artist
  — Anarchives of fire (works-in-progress)
• Jeanne Lebrun & Manon Maes
  — Collective La Vie plus belle
• Rayane Mcirdi, artist, filmmaker (sous réserve)
  — You’ll Never Walk Alone (2014), Le Toit (2018), Le Croissant de feu (2021), Le Jardin (2021), Le Bord de l’Oise (2023), After the Sun (2024), etc.

Accessible to French speakers only