Seventh art reborn at festivals

This month, our columnist explores the apparent contradiction between declining cinema attendance and the growing success of film festivals.

There was a time when going to the movies was an almost weekly activity. Darkened cinemas were gathering places, spaces where collective emotions were experienced. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in 1936 that the seventh art was perhaps the only mass art form, since its tenfold reproducibility allowed it to be disseminated to millions of people, something that neither music, theater, painting nor literature could match (at least at the time).

Television, followed by streaming, have further enhanced the distribution capacity of this form of artistic expression. Paradoxically, however, platforms have largely attenuated this sense of collective experience, by