Last week we returned from the 63rd edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival where we participated in the market that is held in parallel. It is a forum where producers offer distributors and television channels their latest productions. A good part of what we will see in theaters and televisions in the near future is decided there. We perceive a possessive discourse about the audience in the mouths of a good part of the television buyers to whom the producers offered to embark on co-production:
“Although I love it, my audience won’t understand your documentary”
“Our audience is not interested in this issue”
“Unfortunately, my channel is not yet betting on this type of format”
These statements raised questions about the “belonging” of the audience. How flexible is an audience in the face of different proposals from the same channel? Is it negative that television confronts our opinions and beliefs with ideas, themes and aesthetic tastes different from “our own”? From a creative perspective, we believe that placing ourselves beyond our framework of security and knowledge is an end to which a good part of the documentaries we produce should aspire.
Among the large distributors and exhibitors there is a commercial tendency to prioritise the homogenisation and infantilisation of the audience. This is justified by higher profitability. This pulse focuses on simplifying narrative and thematic discourses to embrace an audience that is not only young, but also young. This trend puts in check those original productions in themes and languages that invite the audience to a permeability towards the different and the complex. In the same way, it prevents an active and critical attitude towards the audiovisual work.
As a producer, submitting to the pressures of uniformity would be a failure for a language with as much inspiring, introspective and critical power as the audiovisual one.
We cannot underestimate the flexibility of the public. Numerous exhibitors, distributors and televisions have molded it to their liking and have tried to represent the wishes of the public. But what they really defended was their own interests and fears.
We are convinced of the mental elasticity of the viewer to languages and approaches radically different from contemporary ones. Change and innovation in stylistic approaches is not something new, it has always been done. But the commercial demand has never been so fierce, especially among the younger generations.
Public television and cinemas are attending their own funeral from the moment that many television channels omit the new trends of a vast, disaggregated and demanding public. They focus on safeguarding their audience levels among an increasingly larger and lazy audience. They despise intelligence and seem to have forgotten creativity and freshness. It is urgent that television channels become permeable to new communication leaders. It is necessary that they integrate the multiplicity of discourses and aesthetics without asking permission from the audiometer.