[Reporter’s Notebook] Capital Remains, Film Disappears

Closure of CGV Myeongdong Station Cine Library
Two Decades of Audience Memories Lost
Rebuilding an Institutional Framework for Diversity

The CGV Myeongdong Station Cine Library is soon closing its doors due to financial difficulties. As one of the few venues in Seoul dedicated to screening independent and art films, film enthusiasts have expressed their disappointment.

CGV plans to relocate its independent and art film theater (Art House) to Dongdaemun, and the 8,000 film books displayed in the book caf? will be preserved by the Korean Film Archive. However, the time and memories accumulated by audiences over the past 20 years cannot be relocated.

This closure highlights the shrinking space for independent and art films in the Korean film market. Until 2019, CGV gradually increased the number of Art House screens, but now there are fewer than twenty. The Myeongdong Station Cine Library was a key hub for this movement.

With the aggressive expansion of multiplexes in the 2010s, movies became part of daily life. Paradoxically, however, the films shown on screens became increasingly standardized. Opening week box office results now determine everything, and independent and art films are relegated to early morning time slots before quietly disappearing. Even films that have won awards at film festivals are not exempt from this trend.

The Myeongdong Station Cine Library continued to experiment with ways to make film a part of culture, through book exhibitions and audience discussions. However, after the COVID-19 pandemic, audience numbers plummeted. The venue has suffered such severe financial hardship that it can no longer pay rent, leading to its closure.

CGV’s relocation of the Art House and preservation of the books can be seen as the bare minimum effort to maintain balance. However, if this measure ends up being a simple relocation and programming continues to focus on commercial films, the structural problems in the film ecosystem will inevitably persist.

Film is not merely a product but a form of culture. A society that consumes only standardized films will ultimately develop standardized thinking. When cultural diversity disappears, a society’s creativity declines as well.

France, through its National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC), directly supports art cinemas and has a system in which a portion of commercial film revenues is reinvested in independent and art films. In Japan, some regions operate mini-theater support programs. Korea should also consider adopting such systems, including introducing a mandatory independent film screening policy or expanding public cinemas.

Can creative culture survive in a society that pursues only efficiency? If there is neither policy support nor public interest, what will be next? What is needed now is not the restoration of a space, but the redesign of the system. Creating an institutional framework that allows diversity to thrive even within an efficient market-that is the real investment for the next generation.