Makes sense. I guess they want potential winners to be viewable by the people and not appear to be promoting netflix as the only option.
Movies are available after 4 months for VOD with per-movie payment, and other delays apply depending on the situation (e.g. 10 months for cinema-specific paid TV-channel with partnerships with cinema orgs, etc).
Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologie_des_médias#Disposi...
There is this thing in France called "l'exception culturelle" which means not that culture is exceptional, but that cultural products (books and movies essentially) should be exempt from normal (international) competition rules that apply to all other sectors of the economy.
The rationale is that cultural products are "special" and that if they're not protected, they'll vanish and be replaced by American ones that are inferior by nature.
In general terms, the bad consequences of protectionism are twofold:
1. It raises prices for the customer by limiting competition
2. It limits exports, as international partners try to do to your products what you do to theirs (keeping them out of their market)
French cultural products are notoriously difficult to export, for a variety of reasons, one of which being language and another being they're generally of poor quality (I say this as a Frenchman), so problem 2 isn't seen as major (you can't harm exports that you don't have).
And problem 1 isn't big either because everyone benefits from high prices which allow high taxes that further finance the cinema, and no one cares about the end user.
Personally I think this is a bad system that is in large part responsible for the poor quality mentioned above.
That said, rules should apply to all. Just because those rules are bad doesn't mean Netflix or Amazon should be exempt from them. We should change the rules -- but that's, like, hard.
In fairness to France, other countries have similar laws too. Australia requires TV stations to broadcast 55% Australian-produced TV shows & films during primetime (6pm - midnight). Even 80% of the TV commercials have to be Australian-produced too. But instead of funding lots of culturally significant TV shows, we tend to get repeated news bulletins, low-cost Australian game shows, current affairs shows & soap operas. [Although Neighbours probably counts as culturally significant to Australia.]
http://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Broadcast/Television/Austral...
Our homegrown tv and movie industry was never going to be high quality though, because we're a small market and we've never really been a particularly literary people. I'm curious as to what kind of show you would consider to be 'culturally significant', though. The only staples that you haven't listed that spring to mind are sports (plenty on TV), panel shows (ditto), documentaries (small market everywhere) and sitcoms. What kind of tv show do you consider 'culturally significant'?
Absolutely. I deleted it from my post, but I was going to mention that on non-primary Australian TV stations that don't have the same content restrictions, we get 2 hours of non-stop Big Bang Theory reruns, or endless repeats of Frasier, Sex And The City, Charmed & Becker.
> What kind of tv show do you consider 'culturally significant'?
Glitch is my favorite recent Australian TV show, started on ABC but apparently Season 2 has been sold as a Netflix exclusive. Back in the 90s it would have been shows like Seachange, Frontline, Kath & Kim. Maybe Offspring & Packed To The Rafters are recent equivalents.
(Outside Australia, I'd think of shows like The Bridge, Springfloden, The Killing & Occupied, that have exported Scandinavian culture onto Australian TV.)
I'm not a Frenchman, I'm Canadian, and I completely disagree with this, of course this is all about personal taste, but since you use yours to construct your argument I thought I had to contradict.
Compared to the utter crap pop culture the US produces, where every second film is about superheroes in spandex and explosions?
well that's see some bias here.
One is that a country should have a lively cultural scene to be interesting to live in. If you lived in a city with a large cultural scene and another one without, you probably see the point.
Another is that a country's culture is a component of its soft power. Not having a lively culture is seen as being culturally under foreign domination.
In France, laws are more easily passed and repealed than in, say, the US. Passing a law isn't quite the "enshrinement" one might first imagine.
To wit: laws are passed daily, and they generally have to do with administrative procedures.
In fact, there are so many laws being passed for such a large number of things that we've coined a phrase to describe it: legislative inflation.
Is that the right phrase?
Movie production isn't what I would think of as a regulated industry; this seems more like regular lobbying.
>Regulatory capture is a form of government failure that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
Specifically in this case however, the "public interest" could be described as the preservation and promotion of French culture. Which in this case, could be argued IS served by the regulation that awards can only be given to the product which shows in French theaters.
Since we'd have to note that it also means that it must pass all relevant French classification regulations.
Now, I'm Canadian and we have a series of laws called "can-con" (which stands for Canadian content) where all licensed broadcasters must show a certain proportion of their shows as approved can-con (based on the proportion of the creative staff who are Canadians). This does have an effect on shoring up the difference in culture. I mean - so - maybe that results in Trailer Park Boys - but come on! That episode where Rush shows up? Pure gold.
I think the requirement to restrict to cinema-only is a bit of a sledgehammer solution but I personally see the point and think it's overall a good thing.
Theatres should be able to show streaming movies. I'm sure they have the tech for it. Licensing and permissions are always a thorny beast for new tech though.
This seems to harm others more than Netflix. Does an award nomination or win for a Netflix only movie even have a detectable impact on subscription?
Another point, streaming-only movies have already been shown in the past but they weren't a problem because they didn't threaten the big movie associations. Netflix completely bypasses them and that suddenly becomes a problem.
Can't imagine what a mess all this licensing etc is. Such a non-productive waste of time.
It seems strange to say, "Well, a film must be in a cinema" when that's not how most people watch them. (At least not the vast majority of films they watch in any of the countries I've been in.)
It's not that they banned all soulless corporations producing faux art, they just banned a change in watching habits to prop up an industry with poor value proposition.
Film as a medium is a valuable part of culture; theatres aren't necessarily.
Theatres must offer something over sitting on the couch -- and in the US they have, introducing things like bars and food services.
I especially liked the undertone in some pieces (not Slate) that Netflix is 'exploiting' Cannes to promote its movies, as if that was not the actual point of a festival.
David Sedaris goes on at length about moving to France and falling in love with the film culture there, where movies are shown in small theatres very cheaply. This was back in 2000, so things may have changed, but he was very clear on the differences between the American and French theater-going experience.
> Film as a medium is a valuable part of culture; theatres aren't necessarily.
You should probably stop calling it 'film', then. Most theatres can still show actual films; few homes can.
Still seems like many laws and rules about nothing to me.