In Fear and loathing Hollywood as streaming ground platforms gain during pandemic

He pleaded for a return to shared experience, saying cinemas and theaters were the antidote to the “forced reclusion and imprisonment.”

“The Greeks talk of catharsis, so you

find yourself crying or rejoicing with other people you don’t know, and it’s essential in our lives as humans,” Almodovar said.

“If a film of mine is shown in a cinema I can hear the audience breathe, it gives me the pulse of to what extent my film excites people.

“If I put my film on a platform like Netflix, I lose that contact with the spectator,” Almodovar said.

Even those who have embraced the streamers, like Venice’s departing director Alberto Barbera – who premiered three Netflix films including Marriage Story in 2019 – now have reservations.

“We are tired of seeing films in streaming,” he told AFP.

“Watching them online helped us get through the lockdown, but we cannot lose the experiences of seeing them on a big screen,” he said.

But “one of the consequences of confinement is that the streamers now have enormous sway,” Barbera added.

Rising US director Gia Coppola, whose sharp new satire on online culture, Mainstream, is showing at Venice, told AFP that lockdowns may have only hastened the inevitable.

‘New form of TV’

“Those platforms always seemed like they were going to become the new studios, and take over,” said the maker of Palo Alto, the grand-daughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola.

“But it is cool that they also support some really talented independent filmmakers,” with Netflix backing Roma – which won the top prize in Venice in 2018 for the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron.

Cannes film festival chief Thierry Fremaux took the long view.

The world’s biggest festival has had an often tetchy relationship with Netflix, barring it from its competition unless it showed its films in French cinemas first.

Fremaux insisted that streaming was merely “a new form of television.”

“We will see in 120 years if we will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of the platforms,” he said, pointing out that cinema had resisted many challenges for more than a century.

“We have to stop declaring the end of cinema every time there is a change,” Fremaux said.

And cult French director Quentin Dupieux of Rubber fame, whose black comedy Mandibules is bowing at Venice, had a typically wacky take.

“I had no desire to watch Netflix [during the lockdown] because funnier things were happening outside,” he told AFP.

And returning to the cinema held no fears for him.

“As soon as the lights when down I forgot absolutely that there were infected people next to me and that they were eating popcorn and spitting it at me...”