“Cinema vs Streaming: The Battle for the Collective Viewing Experience”

The most important European film festival begins on Tuesday in Cannes. 19 films are competing for the Palme d’Or, and several hundred films will be shown in various series up to May 27th. Business as usual after the pandemic? Cinema in general is still in crisis. But for which economic and social area can no crisis be identified today?

At least the number of visitors is going up again, unfortunately with rising energy costs at the same time, which is a problem for movie theaters. While almost 120 million people went to the cinema in Germany in 2019, in 2020 and 2021 it was only about a third of them. In 2022 the market recovered a little and with 78 million tickets sold, the number of visitors almost doubled compared to the previous year.

But not only the cinemas that were closed or restricted in their operations during the pandemic, whether large multiplexes or small art house cinemas, but also the sometimes canceled film festivals made the entire film sector less visible in the arts pages. At least that is now changing again. But due to the offers of the ever expanding streaming services, the cinemas are faced with great competition. The fact that some streaming productions, such as the German Netflix film “Nothing New in the West”, which won four Oscars, first starts in cinemas and can then be seen in the stream a few weeks later does not change that.

The movie theaters used to advertise with the slogan »Treffpunkt Kino«. But this meeting point has always been subject to major changes. Every media change influences the cinema business. Until the early 1980s, it was common to see not only new films, but also important Hollywood movies from the past for a few marks in the cinema because there were only three television programs and comparatively few feature films to be seen, but that changed with the rise of private television radically. Video already existed before, it was replaced by DVD and Blue Ray. The so-called video stores disappeared with streaming.

The slipper cinema at home does not offer the magic of a cinema hall with a large screen that fills almost the entire field of vision, which promotes the illusion of being in the film being watched – an illusion that is experienced collectively in the cinema hall. Add to that the slightly drowsy, almost hangover-like atmosphere when the light slowly comes on again, the visitors get up from their armchairs and walk out of the hall back into reality – regardless of whether they were kicked off with a grin by a comedy, politically agitated or intellectually from the art house format. flushed cathartically.

The difference between the cinema and the television at home, which nowadays usually has a widescreen format and a much larger screen, is no longer comparable to that of the past when the old telly was in the living room – unless a laptop or tablet has to be used to watch films . For example, not watching a Cassavetes film like »Woman under the Influence« on a screen would almost certainly be considered a sacrilege by purists. The film, with its socio-critical and realistic character, is also a visual work of art because of the through-composed images reminiscent of opulent paintings, and that doesn’t really come into its own on the television or any other small screen. But screens are no longer only found in cinemas. Projector costs have fallen drastically over the past two decades. More and more people have equipment that is hardly comparable in quality to that of a cinema hall, but which also makes it possible to “watch the cinema” at home on a completely different level than was previously the case.

In addition, and this is quite fatal for the cinema, many streaming providers such as Amazon offer comparatively new films that have only recently been released as additional offers for a surcharge, such as the fantasy strip “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, which became a big winner at the Oscars and which Amazon subscribers can beam onto their home screens for three euros. It’s even faster in the USA, where almost all new cinema films can be watched in streams very soon after they open in cinemas. A working world that is increasingly encroaching on the private sphere, which leads to less free time available, encourages this film consumption. And the evening, weekday film entertainment in the form of an almost one-hour episode of a series, at which not a few viewers are already closing their eyes, are more compatible with the late capitalist leisure time accounts of a population drained by wage labor than a so-called full-length feature film of 90 minutes or more.

The streaming platforms with their series offer a contemporary cinematic storytelling that simply cannot be played in the cinema. A mini-series (six to a maximum of ten parts) roughly corresponds in scope to what the public service programs from ARD to BBC presented in earlier decades as four-part series such as “Treasure Island” or “Sea Wolf”, which was then popularly celebrated as “street sweeper”. . This narrative form, which is served in uncomplicated bits and yet more complex, is much more suitable for film adaptations of literature than the cinema, such as the BBC-HBO series adaptation of »His dark materials« (2019-2022), which shows the critical-political part of Philipp Pullmann’s novel trilogy in all its complexity, while the Hollywood film adaptation with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig (2007) remains only superficial. And Netflix and Co. can also show art house, such as the Oscar-nominated film »Bardo« (2022) or the Don Delillo adaptation »White Noise« (2022). The streaming services also come up with surprising political content unimaginable in mainstream cinema.

The creators of the racism-critical Black Western opus »The harder they fall« (2021) state that no studio wanted to make this film, which is why they went to Netflix, where there is a considerable range of feature films, series, but also documentaries on the subject of racism. Spike Lee’s black Vietnam epic »Da 5 Bloods« (2020) was turned down by countless studios and finally made the film on Netflix as well. So the cinema is not automatically a guarantee of high culture, as is often the case in one or the other feuilleton. It is then a matter of taking a closer look and distinguishing between small, ambitious program cinemas and large commercial blockbuster playback stations.

But cities without cinemas are a horrible idea. So if you want to continue going to the cinema, you should visit the cinema of your choice regularly. Above all, cinema is lived everyday culture and it cannot be promoted in a practical way soon enough. In one of Berlin’s oldest cinemas, the Moviemento in Kreuzberg, founded in 1907, there is regularly the so-called Spatzenkino, which is visited by daycare groups in the morning. The magic of the cinema hall can also be conveyed to the little ones and they are always very enthusiastic.