The partnership forged between Netflix, the Cinémathèque française and the Lumière Institute continues to make people cringe. On Twitter, the filmmaker Xavier Beauvois showed his discontent, qualifying
“allegiance”
to the American industrialist as
“indelible shame”
cast on the Parisian institution. In a second tweet, the director of
Albatros
and
Of Men and Gods
even goes so far as to call the potential audience a
"collaborator"
wishing to
"kill the cinema"
.
The mini-festival of the streaming platform, the "Netflix film club", which will be held from December 7 to 14 in the institutions of Paris and Lyon, is however well below the initial ambition.
While it had to give up its partnership project with private cinemas, due to strong opposition from organizations representing the profession, the American online video giant plans to screen six films released in 2021 (including
The Power of the Dog
by Jane Campion) and three previews, including
La main de Dieu
by Paolo Sorrentino.
To read also "French cinema must work with Netflix, Amazon, YouTube"
The main players in the French film industry saw the platform's first project as a departure from the media chronology and head-on competition for classic theatrical releases. In the columns of
Echoes
, the general delegate of the National Federation of French cinemas, Marc-Olivier Sebbag, said he was satisfied with the back-pedaling of Netflix:
"We have been heard"
, he welcomed. Still in
Les Echos
, the boss of UGC, Alain Sussfeld, said he was
"quite radically scandalized by the position"
of the Cinémathèque and the Institut Lumière, arguing that this collaboration feeds
"the confusion between audiovisual broadcasting and cinematographic broadcasting "
.
Loss of economic and social gains
For his part, the producer and distributor of films Jean Labadie described, in
Liberation
, the platform's initiative as a
“promotional operation”
.
“When we see
[…]
the number of operators who were ready to sign, we tell ourselves that they are either desperate or not very smart,”
he quipped, prophesying
“that the cool model that is imposes ”
could destroy, like Uber,
“ many old gains, both economically and socially ”
.
Especially since Netflix's collaboration with the Cinémathèque is not trivial insofar as the first has become a patron of the second, as stipulated in a joint press release released on January 14, 2021. The platform is financially involved in
Abel Gance's
restoration of
Napoleon
, shown for the first time in 1927, and of which
“scraps of images”
have been disseminated all over the world.
Until the last moment, doubts remained around the holding of the "Netflix film club".
In
Les Échos
, a so-called
"well-informed"
source
assured that the Cinémathèque was going to give up its participation.
The ticket office is finally open.
Lectures on feature films are also on the program of the event, as well as meetings with some of the actors, such as Filippo Scotti and Toni Servillo in the cast of
La main de Dieu
.
