ANDOctober and the French newspaper Le Monde in the article entitled Cinemas are looking for their audience inserted a fatal prophecy: «It is not yet the Titanic, but we are close “. France, which just last year triumphed in the two major festivals in the world, in Cannes with Titane, in Venice with L’événement, he had lost along the way “the base of cinephile viewers and of a certain age, which could be counted on for the release of a mainstream arthouse film”. And he hadn’t found a replacement.
The manufacturer and distributor Jean Labadie, 35 years of success and a collection of Golden Palms, in the same days a Libération confessed: “We are 30 percent below the usual data, we have lost an entire part of the audience and the decline is more noticeable in the auteur cinema segment“.
The hurricane that struck
If France cries, Italy does not laugh. In July the Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini revealed: “The data on the decline in revenues, attendance, spectators and visitors are impressive and demonstrate what hurricane has struck on the lives of each of us and in particular on the world of culture, with prolonged closures over the months and detachment from the places where people are necessarily together ».
But yet.
The study area of the Troisi cinema.
Valerio Carocci, president of the Piccolo America Association to whom we owe the restoration of the Troisi room in Rome which, after six years of closure, reopened its doors in September, has another reading from its observatory: «They tell us that the public does not return to the room. And even before the pandemic reduced the numbers, it was thought that children no longer went to the cinema, at most in multiplexes. But we are recording a different fact. The public is there and it is younger“. From 21 September, the opening date of the hall, in 85 days of programming, more or less half of which with a capacity of 50 percent, 25 thousand tickets were sold in the Trastevere cinema: a more than encouraging figure. Outcome of a path: “We are reaping the benefits of years in which we have offered the city our summer arenas for free (in San Cosimato, Ostia, Cervelletta and Monte Ciocci, ed), as if it were a large public video library: these are the same people who today return to the cinema as a paying audience “. Carocci, born in 1991, is among the oldest in the pool of “boys” who work at Troisi, alternating between programming, administration, ticketing, foyer-cafeteria, social networks (“200 thousand likes on Facebook, 60 thousand on Instagram”), management of the exhibition space and study room, 70 seats between the inside and the terrace with free access 24 hours a day and for 365 daysi, a space where other kids like them are to study or work and that in these months it was attended by 21 thousand student-spectators.
It goes up with an identity
“We talk to people, we try to understand what they are looking for, what they want to see,” explains Carocci. “When Bernardo Bertolucci met us years ago, he said that we were young people who made films without knowing anything, who were discovering it by projecting it. It was true, but we gradually learned and realized what was needed was a cultural aggregative pole, which dialogues with the city, not a place to project videotapes. At the age of twenty when I started, but others who made this journey with me were only 13 or 14, we were not moved by cinephile desires, but by the need to create “a space of urban discontinuity” as we called it then ” . Now that space has taken the form of a 298-seat cinema that employs seven full-time and thirty part-time people, all under-30s, covering three 8-hour shifts. A cinema that is sold out for Samp of Rezza-Mastrella and that with the resumption of The postman in the morning he took out 170 tickets. «We need to provide quality and identity to the cinema. If you become lazy on the principle that the film to be shown is the one that the distributor or the local agent has declared to be the top title, you will never build new audiences. You have to choose, bet, diversify: from the matinee to the new format that we invented at 11.59 pm with which we obtained extraordinary results projecting Last Night in Soho And The Lighthouse, the film with Willem Dafoe that had never been released due to the pandemic and which we have shown for the first time on the big screen. At midnight, for two weeks, we had an average of 60 spectators, a figure which many aspire to even for peak hours ». What if Titane And Annette, less easy titles than Spider-Man, they went well, more surprising is that Days by Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang has achieved results worthy of a French comedy. “But we have also planned the last Bond: let’s go in search of all audiences»Concludes Carocci. «Opening a theater in September, after the lockdown, finally freed us from the confrontation with the ghost of the public from before. We started from scratch and thought about the present ».
A change of gear
To the Antaeus cinema in Milan, the past was represented above all by the “sciure”, numerous and all diligently queuing up on weekdays and holidays to see the latest quality comedy or award-winning films at festivals. That audience has largely – we hope only temporarily – lost, but another has appeared. Which has forced a change of gear. Sergio Oliva, in charge of programming the Anteo Spazio cinema in Milan and its province, he took note of it: «Unfortunately the public has decreased and in the account of the losses there is certainly to include the more mature band. Fear or choice not to get vaccinated are certainly to be counted among the causes “. But others have decided not to miss any more opportunities to go out, perhaps in search of community moments after the loneliness of the lockdown. AND The choices have changed: «Young people no longer see only American commercial films, now they are also looking for quality films»Explains Oliva. “But they want to see them in their original language. Therefore the double option, original or dubbed version has become the rule. Including Asian films ».
Already relegated to punitive hours and tiny theaters, the films in the language have taken the best spots: «And when the language is English, the original version is much more in demand than the dubbed one. For House of Gucci out of five daily shows, four are in original and one in Italian“. A Copernican revolution, possible thanks to a generational change. With age that drops as far as we can push ourselves to propose a subtitled version: «I’m the only one who does it in Milan: at 1 pm I program original films for children. Encanto, the Disney cartoon, in the Citylife room has long been in English with subtitles. And we had 50-60 people showing. Of course, a feasible choice in a big city, but I know from colleagues who manage theaters in the province that at least once a week they too do screenings in language. The public is changing ». And the times change. If with the lockdown we all went to bed earlier, “and consequently the last screenings were at 9.30 pm at the latest, now I have brought them back to 10, 10.30 pm because those are the times that the boys prefer”. Which never cease to surprise us: in December Harry Potter re-released in theaters and recorded the first gross of the week. “Even when I have planned Mulholland Drive by David Lynch (another 20 years old) I filled the room. Shooting historical, beautiful films, masterpieces, which young people have not seen and which they would never see on TV or on the computer, works ».
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