27/11/2012 - Amid strained relations between cinemas and cinephiles, the Europa Cinemas network's annual conference provided the opportunity to review exhibition in European cinemas.

The Europa Cinemas network’s annual conference provided the opportunity to review exhibition in European cinemas with, on one side, dynamic and innovative initiatives and, on the other, the conservatism inherent to the majority of European exhibitors.

Repeated like a mantra, the phrase “Cinemas are the main place to watch films” also became “Cinemas have to remain the main place” and “Cinemas should be the main place” which, practically, already shows a shift corresponding to a real discrepancy. The French minister of culture, Aurélie Fillipetti, Aviva Silver from the European Commission’s MEDIA programme, and French film director Laurent Cantet spearheaded the phrase, but important figures within the network celebrating its 20th anniversary obviously seek to open up a path to the future. Claude-Eric Poiroux (interview) talks of cinemas as “the only place to bring people together” and gives nuance to Europa Cinemas’ founding phrase by describing the infrastructure as “an innovative and avant-garde place”. As for president Ian Christie, he reminded listeners that “it’s important to not be purist in cinema because it has always been a hybrid experience”. In a time of transmedia, cinema on demand, the legal and illegal offer of VoD, alternative content, debate over media chronology, and exponential technical innovations started with the advent of digital, despite resistance from exhibitors who defend old-fashioned cinema attendance, there is no longer any need to prove the hybridisation of that which is supposed to provoke the great social shiver of a collective experience on the big screen. This shared emotion — which should not be limited to a queue at the entrance, a head in front of you during the screening, and then another queue at the exit — would thus be the added value of a film in a cinema, this place that the public increasingly tends to consider as a medium that would be just as good as another if it hadn’t become quite so expensive.

Having personally had 11 of my last 12 public screenings spoilt by people devouring popcorn, mobile phones — including mine vibrating in my pocket —, laughter out of context, snoring, and general unrest among the audience, I am increasingly less receptive to this argument — although I am to the contextual emotion, as strong as ever and which only too often gets my nerves in a twist and negatively affects my perception of the work on the screen. I imagine that it must be even more frustrating for a film-lover who has bought a ticket because he is not a journalist, but loves cinema, wants to distract himself, travels, let himself be overcome by or resist a story whose context he sadly does not control, whereas elsewhere he controls all aspects of his consumption on demand in conditions that he has set for himself. For such people, cinemas should be the best place to watch a film. But in practice, it is no longer so and their time table generally no longer includes the exception of a fixed cinematic rendez-vous in a cinema.

In the case of a festival, the magic remains obvious. Red carpet, exclusivity, and the presence of stars make the film theatre an exceptional venue that is comparable to a live experience. On internet, no costs and immediacy on demand are clearly the platform’s advantages. DVD and Blu-ray offer the original version (still absent from most European cinemas) and extras that bring added value to the work’s consumption. But what of daily cinema attendance in this reasoning based on the public’s habits? What more does it bring to the digital natives and to the integration models of the digital immigration? Cinemas’ golden niche in media chronology seems to be a very fragile exclusivity in a time of cultural overproduction that allows both wide audience and the cinephiles to remain perfectly up-to-date and occupied if they stall their consumption by only a few months. And then there remains the notion of "community" that neighbourhood cinemas can proudly defend thanks to amazing creativity in cultivating it. At the heart of the Europa Cinemas network, there are pioneers and active exhibitors who are leading the 2.0 practice of exhibiting films in cinemas. Yet, in the same group, they sadly drag along passive colleagues who cannot even begin to oppose their pretence of a community to a dynamic online forum or a community of Facebook friends who share, compare, meet, marry, and have many children who will increasingly less go to this location that should have been the main place to watch a film.

(Translated from French)