Covid was supposed to kill cinema – but did lockdown and gen Z save cinephilia?

Amid all the dire news to come out of the movie business this year – a box office slump, a slowdown of production, growing unemployment in Hollywood, the closure of a dozen cinemas in the UK – good news seems to have come from the unlikeliest of places: cinephilia, pronounced “dead” by Susan Sontag in 1996, is alive and well and sporting a Mubi tote bag among the very demographic, 18- to 25-year-olds, whose gif-shortened attention spans are usually held up as spelling the death of the medium.

A recent Wim Wenders retrospective including Wings of Desire and The American Friend took £225,700 at the box office – more than double its distributor, Curzon, expected. A North American rerelease of Chen Kaige’s 1993 Palme d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine grossed $350,000. Even a recent retrospective of the auteur’s auteur, melancholy Hungarian Béla Tarr – including the seven-hour Sátántangó – took £65,000. What makes these figures all the more surprising is that these films are readily available to audiences on DVD, BFI Player, the Criterion channel or other home entertainment companies such as Vinegar Syndrome. Even more surprising is the demographic they are succeeding with: a recent 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, took almost $7m in its 2023 re-release by A24, with three-quarters of audiences seeing it in a cinema for the first time and more than 60% of its audience not yet born when the film was released in 1984.

Cinema-going has still to reach pre-pandemic levels but rereleases of classic films are booming, thanks to the fact that gen Z seem to have discovered old movies. “Lockdown had this effect on young audiences realising, through online viewing, that there were a lot more films out there than they previously thought,” says Paul Gallagher, programme manager of the Glasgow Film Theatre. “There is a popular narrative that streaming is killing cinema, but actually people are discovering a wider range of cinema through streaming.” Noodling around on Letterboxd during the pandemic with nothing for it but a deep dive into Taiwanese cinema of the 1990s, the under-25s are now turning out in record numbers for the old repertory cinemas – of which there are now more than 1,500 in the UK, a 50% increase since Covid – lured by ticket discount schemes and sparkling new 4k rereleases. Research commissioned by classic film distributors Park Circus found that the UK and Ireland market for classic movies in 2022 and 2023 had grown 139% since 2019.

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“We’ve had the busiest 12 months in our history,” says Paul Vickery, head of programming at the Prince Charles cinema in London, where Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love has played virtually non-stop since the pandemic. “The core staples of our programme have completely changed,” he says. When Vickery joined the Prince Charles in 2007, staple movies such as Wayne’s World, Labyrinth and Mean Girls used to play downstairs in the big 300-seater venue, while arthouse films such as After Hours, Barry Lyndon and Beau Travail played upstairs in the smaller 104-seater. “That has completely reversed,” he says, “The upstairs movies are all playing downstairs and the downstairs movies are playing upstairs. This year the big one was Barry Lyndon. Traditionally, that’s the sort of film you might see on a Sunday afternoon or maybe midweek evening. Now, it’s become a Saturday night movie. ‘Oh, we’ve got a three-hour gap in the programme, put Barry Lyndon on.’”

A lot of this activity is galvanised by sites such as Letterboxd, the “social film discovery platform”, which has seen its user base nearly double since the beginning of the pandemic. “We saw people having watch parties every week and groups of friends creating lists, pandemic watch party lists, and creating games around how to choose what film to watch, and then kind of imposing a movie they discovered on their friends,” says Gemma Greenwood, editor-in-chief of Letterboxd’s Journal, who points to the “Letterboxd bump” films enjoy after endorsement on the site. When Watershed in Bristol screened Edward Yang’s Yi Yi in one of its smaller auditoriums, hoping to sell 40 tickets, it sold 170 and had to move it to a bigger screen. The reason? Yi Yi had been recommended on Letterboxd, where it sat at No 11 on the Top 250 list of narrative features, drawn from members’ ratings. “We get a lot of people who arrive and go, ‘OK, I’m going in and I’m going to watch all 250 films’, or ‘I’m going to watch Chantal Akerman’s filmography’. And we see that in people’s [onsite] diaries. We see them going on this journey.”

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More than offering an invaluable livestream of the changing tastes of gen Z for film programmers – the Prince Charles has just programmed an entire season of films plucked from the Letterboxd Top 250 – the list offers an unrivalled glimpse of the canon as it changes beneath our feet, particularly when compared with that old boomer mainstay, the Sight and Sound list of 100 greatest films. The majority of films in Sight and Sound’s Top 100 are from the 1950s and 60s, and the most common country of origin is France, which in 2022 boasted 18 entries, thanks to films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Agnès Varda. Most of the rest are made up of directors championed by Cahiers du Cinéma, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder. And if the list has a historical centre of gravity it is Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française in 1968, where “the film generation”, as Stanley Kauffmann called them, would spend the entire day in the theatre watching films back to back, third-row centre, or, if the cinema was full, lying flat on their backs in the front row. When Godard and Jacque Rivette went to see Orson Welles’ Macbeth, they entered the theatre at 2pm and watched repeated screenings until Godard left at 10pm; Rivette, who liked it more, stayed until midnight. That is more or less a walkout in Godard terms: watching Macbeth only four times.

“How far away that era seems now,” wrote Susan Sontag in her 1996 essay for the New York Times entitled The Decay of Cinema, in which she lamented the passing of the era when “going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.” She hardly found it any more, “at least among the young … If cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.”

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Sontag might well have found such a rebirth on the Letterboxd list, although she would have to prepare herself for a shock: at the time of writing, the Top 100 shares only 19 titles with the Sight and Sound list. It still includes big directors such as Bergman (five films) and Stanley Kubrick (three) but France doesn’t even get a look in until Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, at 17, and thereafter manages only five films – no Godard, no Truffaut, while the New Wave is ancient history. The big swingers of the Letterboxd list hail mostly from Asia, not Europe, led by Akira Kurosawa (five films), Masaki Kobayashi (four) Bong Joon-ho (three) Hayao Miyazaki (two) Edward Yang (two) and Park Chan-wook (two). The centre of gravity has shifted east from Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française to Tokyo’s Shin-Bungeiza cinema in Toshima city, about midway through Japanese cinema’s second Golden Age in the 90s. The cry of one of the characters in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964) – “One can’t live without Rossellini!” – might now be reparsed, more accurately as “One can’t live without Studio Ghibli!”

“If you see the culture of somebody on their phone, sometimes this generation looks more like characters in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film than they do classic American movies,” says Brian Saur, one of the hosts of the hosts of the Pure Cinema Podcast, the official podcast of Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly cinema in LA, who says the availability of foreign TV dramas has helped acclimatise viewers to subtitles. He approves of the streak of longing revealed in Gen Z tastes, as borne out by the recent resurgence enjoyed by titles such as In the Mood for Love which has taken more than $2m in its recent rereleases, Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, which took $465,000, Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, which took $45,534, or Portrait of a Lady on Fire which has become a Valentine’s Day staple at the Glasgow Film Theatre. “If so much of dating is done through apps in the modern world, imagine what it must be like to watch movies where there are meet-cutes,” says Sauer. “It must really set your brain racing, like: ‘Why can’t I have had that’?”

If Gen Z long for the ache of a previous generation’s romances, they seem much less bound by the cultural hang-ups of boomer cinephiles, for whom enjoyment of a movie was often second in importance to making you feel small for not having seen it, or having liked it for the wrong reasons (“You went for that, huh?”), or having seen it but not located the precise mix of qualities that made Dreyer’s Gertrud, or Hitchcock’s Marnie, worthy of impassioned defence against from the philistine masses. Not that Gen Z are without their revisionism – Barry Lyndon was for many years regarded as Kubrick’s worst film, and Jane Campion’s once derided erotic thriller In the Cut is among the many whose rating on Letterboxd has been rising – along with The Lizzie Maguire Movie, the High School Musicals and Scooby-Do films. But not in a spirit of pop contrarianism. Unstratified, non-judgmental of other people’s tastes, Letterboxd is largely without the boorishness and condescension that characterised much Cahier du cinema and Sight & Sound discourse. People crack jokes – “This happened to my mate Eric” reads a review of Joker – and auteurs are respected but not religiously revered.

“When I was younger, because of the difficulty of access, you would find a niche and dig your heels in as deep as you possibly could,” says Paul Vickery. “Be that Italian crime movies of the 70s or the French New Wave or whatever it was, you would be like, ‘That’s my thing.’ It would take a lot of effort to access all of that media to watch it all, so if you spoke to somebody who hadn’t seen something, your first instinct would be to sort of lean away. The culture has changed now, in that it’s what you lean towards. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, you have to see it. Let me share this with you. Let me send you a link …’ It’s all about fostering a community rather than this gatekeepery ethos.”

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This makes a potentially rich but elusive target for those keen to monetise the new wave of cinephilia in the under-25s. Programmers have to be both flexible and quick on their feet to catch the small waves of enthusiasm that build around certain films in a demographic that is notoriously marketing averse. “Social media algorithms smell the slightest interest from miles away, and eventually your online space becomes a tailor-made world of topical memes, like-minded individuals and film marketing,” says Jana Cservenka, a 21-year-old graduate who works part-time at the Depot cinema in Lewes and who recently went on a deep dive though cat-themed horror films of the 1940s such as Val Lewton’s Cat People and The Leopard Man. “I do find now I won’t just take any old film recommendation, because there’s so much out there. I take recommendations only from people I trust.”

With its blurring of the boundaries between public and private, amateur and professional, niche and mainstream, the online space is so obvious an environment for cinephilia to flourish, it’s amazing it has taken this long to catch on. Maybe critics were for so long fixated on the idea that the internet would kill the production of new movies, that it took an actually lethal variant of the common cold for people to realise what the online space could do for old ones. “It’s not like we’re saying, ‘Wow, this young audience is saving cinema’, but it’s definitely going in the right direction,” says Paul Gallagher, who recently programmed screenings of Mikhail Kalatozov’s classic docudrama about the Cuban revolution, I Am Cuba, at the Glasgow Film Theatre. “I was like, yes, that is definitely a film that the Letterboxd crowd are going to like, and it’s selling tickets already. So yeah, it’s very exciting. There’s so much potential.”