The op-ed comes on the eve of the Lumière Summit, which Macron is co-hosting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung to bring together global entertainment leaders around the future of cinema, TV and gaming In 1895, the first public film screening happened. It was in the basement of the Grand Café, nearby the Paris Opera, with a program of 10 short movies, each no more than 50 seconds long. The names of the two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, became symbols of an art which needs darkness to make light happens.
It heralded a new era of our long-standing Civilization of Images. More than a century after, movies and, more broadly, the moving image industry including video games and animation, are more than ever part of our daily lives. From movie theaters, moving images traveled to the television screens and personal devices and, over the past deeply transformative decade, they have found their way into the palms of our hands.
One cannot think about visual culture without thinking about screens. Screens, in themselves, are neutral. They can be an opportunity to get closer to any audience or a source of risk as we all know from the rise of social media and the inflation of images that some have described as a form of cognitive war.
We see the effects everywhere. Parents worry about their children’s attention. Teachers compete with a permanent flow of images.
Artists wonder whether their work can still find an audience. Governments debate technologies that evolve faster than legislation. And each of us knows the strange experience of reaching for a screen for one reason and emerging much later, having forgotten why.
Yet the screen itself is not our enemy. It has brought extraordinary things into our lives. Never before have so many people had access to so many films, ideas and cultures other than their own.
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