On Saturday May 27th director Justine Triet was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for her film 'Anatomie d’une chute,' ('Anatomy of a Fall'). And she used the occasion to launch a broadside against the French government's policies in an acceptance speech that was broadcast around the world.
First of all she attacked the recent changes to the pension age, declaring that “the country has gone through historic, unanimous protest against the reform of the pension system, which has been dismissed by the government in a shocking way”. The film director then turned her attention to the government's policies on culture, condemning the way this “neoliberal government” treated culture as a “commodity” and how it was “in the process of smashing France’s cultural exception”. Justine Triet added: “That same cultural exception without which I wouldn't be here in front of you today.”
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Her comments immediately triggered outrage from members of the government. The culture minister Rima Abdul-Malak said on Twitter that she was “staggered” by “such an unfair speech”. She continued: “This film could not have come out without our French model of cinema funding, which enables a diversity that's unique in the world.” The industry minister Robert Lescure followed suit, describing the director's acceptance speech as the “definition of ingratitude from a profession that we help so much.”
The government was in effect complaining that Justine Triet was “biting the hand that feeds her”.
Irrelevant arguments
Justine Triet also came under fire on social media and in the mainstream media from those who think she received too much public money for her film. Many were angry that she had got 900,000 euros in funding from public broadcaster France Télévisions, 500,000 euros from the state agency the Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animé (CNC) and 300,000 euros from regional grants, out of a total film budget of 6.2 million euros.
“It's perhaps time to stop handing out so much aid to those who have no awareness of what they cost taxpayers,” said a Member of Parliament from Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance Party, Guillaume Kasbarian (see his interview with Mediapart below).
Yet these arguments completely miss the point, because they do not take account of what Justine Triet said at the end of her speech. The director made it clear there that if she had not benefited from this French “cultural exception” she would quite simply not been received the Palme d’Or. What she was raising, and this goes far beyond her own individual case, were the concerns that are sweeping through the world of French cinema. It is these concerns that the government and its loyalist MPs would clearly like to sweep under the carpet.
In fact, the economic foundations on which the “French cinematographic cultural exception” has been built, which have enabled many low and big budget films to be made over the last 70 years and led to the blossoming of a whole film ecosystem in France, are now in jeopardy.
Audience figures still down
The first economic pillar is cinema audiences. While numbers have risen in recent months, audience figures are still far from returning to pre-Covid levels. The latest report from the CNC for 2022, which were published a few days ago, shows that the number of tickets sold was still 26.9% down on the average for the years 2017 - 2019.
More worrying is the fact that this reduction is affecting “arthouse” films more than big budget movies. In 2022 such films only accounted for 21.5% of ticket sales, against 28.3% in 2019 and an average of 23.5% over the last decade. This automatically places smaller, independent cinemas in greater difficulty as they rely less than the large cinema complexes on American blockbusters or popular French comedies.
But the crisis goes beyond that. The entire economic model of French cinema rests on a high level of cinema audiences. There is a 10.72% tax levied on each ticket, known as the taxe spéciale additionnelle (TSA), which goes into a fund managed by the CNC. This fund is used to help the entire industry: from the making and distribution of films to the renovation of cinemas and equipment, and including film education.
Established after the war, this measure has been central to the organisation and planning of the French film industry. In concrete terms it has allowed for a healthy level of investment in both film industry infrastructure and film production. As a result it has attracted more and more people to the cinema.
Streaming services wreak havoc
Unfortunately this funding machine has now become jammed. One of the more structural reasons for lower cinema audiences is the new competition coming from American streaming service platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney+, as detailed in another study from the CNC. The development of these services was “accelerated by the pandemic”, the report says. As a result they now “reach a wider public” - especially those aged over 60, people who are traditionally regular cinemagoers.
What is the government doing to reverse this trend? In all honesty, not a great deal. On the contrary, it is more likely to assist the development of these platforms in France. And it is these platforms who are trying to shake up the second pillar of French cinema financing: the film scheduling timetable.
This measure, which has been in place since the 1980s, allows television chains such as Canal+, OCS, France 2, Arte, TF1 and M6 to fund French films in exchange for the right to screen them several months or years after they have first been screened in the cinema. This long-standing partnership between the cinema world and television chains has been thrown into doubt because of the arrival and popularity of American streaming platforms here – Netflix claims to have more than ten million subscribers in France.
These companies are not in the habit of funding films that they can then only show their subscribers several months or years after they have appeared on the cinema screen. Indeed, they have instilled in their customers the culture of instant gratification from transient pleasure – otherwise known as binge-watching.
These companies have thus been exerting strong pressure to get these timetable scheduling agreements renegotiated. For example, at the end of last year Disney+ threatened not to release its major movie Black Panther 2 in French cinemas if it did not get significant changes to such agreements. This would have been a nightmare for cinema owners who rely on Marvel films to keep their heads above water.
In response Canal+, who are historically the leading funders of French cinema, threatened to rein in its own spending if this new low-cost competitor was successful in its bid. Since then, the status quo has been preserved. But these endless conflicts between major financiers keep the world of French cinema in a state of constant tension.
A government in collusion
The French government, meanwhile, plays its normal neoliberal game of trying to have it both ways. It does not want to hamper the growth of streaming platforms in France, even though they are disinclined to pay their taxes here – but at the same time it is trying to obtain financial compensation from them in a bid to satisfy all parties.
For example, speaking on France Culture radio last September, culture minister Rina Abdul-Malak rejoiced over France's adoption of the 2021 European directive which requires streaming platforms to devote between 20% and 25% of their turnover to domestic audiovisual and cinematographic production. “It's an historic turning point, as important at the creation of the CNC after the war,” she enthused.
But this does not solve the issue for French cinema: the streaming companies are less interested in arthouse movies than in television-style production – which does not get screened in cinemas – such as TV series. In other words, the minister was congratulating herself for having opened Pandora's Box.
In any case, the bigger the space that streaming firms occupy in the industry, the more they can impose their views on French cinematographic production. It was this trend that industry professionals - including Justine Triet – attacked when they signed an op-ed article in Le Monde in 2021. “We read here and there that digital technology and its global operators control the new way of the world, that it would be wise to yield to this 'modernity'. To stop resisting it. We don't see any sign of modernity in risking the destruction of a cultural and cinematographic fabric with its wealth of diversity,” they wrote.
In the future it will be even harder for regulators to fight such ferocious competition, as the government is also blocking potential ways to finance cinema with public money. In particular, the recent abolition of the television licence - which has been the main income source for France TV and Arte, both major co-producers in the French film industry – could hit these channels' economic models. While for now the loss of this television tax income has been met through diverting some of the state's value added tax (VAT) receipts, this may not always happen in the medium term. Cutting this funding would reduce the financial clout of these key bodies even further.
For all these reasons, and contrary to what the more virulent critics would have us believe, Justine Triet is not completely out of line when she publicly raises the sensitive issue of how this “neoliberal” government's treatment of culture as a “commodity” could threaten the “French cultural exception”. Indeed, she has now started a healthy debate among a large, prime-time audience.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter