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. Cinema was born. 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.
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.
The question is how to preserve that promise while confronting what has gone wrong. We should begin by acknowledging something uncomfortable: we shaped this world, and we must take responsibility for it. But because we shaped it, we can reshape it. The remedy is not to turn away from screens. It is to change our relationship with them on the screens themselves.
To remain lucid about the ways our relationship with screens can damage our world, while being ambitious enough to fulfill their promise, we should look to the arts of the moving image: cinema, series and video games. They have been transformed by the digital revolution. But they also show us what a screen can offer at its best: sustained attention, imagination, authorship and a shared experience of another world.
One distinction therefore matters: the difference between an endless supply of content and works that require time, talent, risk and intention to create.
The value of these works is economic. If the screen industries lose the capacity to finance ambitious works, take risks on unfamiliar voices or sustain the institutions that bring them to audiences, the consequences will eventually show up on our screens. There may be more images than ever, and fewer genuinely different things to see.
Their value is also cultural. Works preserve memory, give form to experience and allow one society to enter the imagination of another. They allow cultures to recognize themselves and to discover one another.
Responding requires a method. No single company and no single nation, however large, can find the solution alone.
Governments do not make films. Artists do not design the technologies through which billions encounter them. Companies cannot define the public interest on their own. And no national institution can respond alone to forces that cross borders by design: technologies, capital, works and audiences.
The purpose of this dialogue should not be to defend yesterday’s model. It should be to build the conditions for a richer creative future: to preserve the possibility of creating ambitious works, ensure that they can circulate, give audiences the tools to navigate an age of infinite images, and make technological progress compatible with human creativity.
This conversation must be global.
That is why, this September, together with the President of the Republic of Korea, I will convene the Lumière Summit. France and South Korea have taken different paths, but both have shown that openness to the world can strengthen, rather than erase, a distinctive creative culture. Governments, artists, companies and institutions will come together to begin building a common response, and to move beyond the divisions of yesterday.
For this moment also offers a rare opportunity for convergence: between cinema, television and gaming; between public authorities and private companies; and between regions of the world that have too often approached these challenges separately. The transformations affecting us are shared. Our response should be as well.
France carries a particular responsibility in this conversation. Proud that cinema was born in France 130 years ago, we should not seek to preserve it in amber. Our task is to help create the conditions in which it can be reinvented.
We built a civilization of images. We should not resign ourselves to watching it deteriorate. The same screens that have become part of the problem can also carry the solution: greater access, greater choice, new forms of creation, new encounters between cultures.
The task is not to turn back. It is to decide, together, what kind of civilization of images we want to build — and whether we have the ambition to make moving images one of the most valuable Common Goods of our times.
