Eric Vauthier
Co-founder of La Rétine de Plateau · pioneer of independent cultural events in Brussels · Brussels, from the 1980s to the Impérial
In 1980s Brussels, large public events belonged to the public authorities: municipalities and the federal state. The Brussels Region did not yet exist; it would be created in 1989. Eric Vauthier was among the first to prove that a large public event could come from somewhere else entirely: a passion and a non-profit, La Rétine de Plateau, which he co-founded with Michel Culot. His passion was cinema. So was Carl De Moncharline's.
Chapters
Cinema, first of all
With Jean-Pierre Mels, the common ground was jazz. With Eric Vauthier, it is cinema. Carl De Moncharline spent part of his youth at the Musée du Cinéma in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, three times a week, watching everything programmed there, with no filter and no hierarchy.
2 document(s) · Open the chapterLes Petits Déjeuners du cinéma, a growing success
Coffee, a croissant, live music and a hundred minutes of cinema, on Sunday morning. Created in 1985 at the Métropole, boulevard Adolphe Max, they spread to several cinemas in the capital, then to Liège, Namur, Ghent and Antwerp: eighteen thousand admissions in 1986, forty-five thousand in 1988. Le Soir ran “Croissants décentralisés de la Rétine” in June 1989, and “a growing success in Liège” in 1990.
2 document(s) · Open the chapterThe Cinquantenaire drive-in
At the time, a large public event in Brussels was almost always the business of a municipal or federal authority. The Cinquantenaire drive-in came from elsewhere: a non-profit, a simple idea and a feel for the public.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterThe CyberThéâtre, ten years ahead
In 1995, the centenary of cinema, Eric Vauthier created the CyberThéâtre and moved into digital cinema when almost nobody believed in it. Jean-Pierre Mels served there as master of ceremonies: Carl De Moncharline's two mentors crossed paths there, around the same intuition.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterThe Champagnothèque, then the Impérial
An epicurean, a lover of cinema and jazz, Eric Vauthier opened Brussels' first champagne library, BEAUBBLES, in December 2009, on rue Royale, in the townhouse of a former wine merchant: one hundred and fifty labels, growers defended from day one, and an invented vocabulary, champagne librarians included. That is how the two men eventually came to work together: he was Carl De Moncharline's champagne sommelier at the Impérial.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterVirtual Palace, today
Eric Vauthier never stopped. Since 1994, he has owned the Virtual Palace, an 1860 building that was the Belgian headquarters of Gaumont from 1946 to 1994. He is turning it into a 21st-century cinema house on a human scale: bar, private cinema in the period stable, green screen, virtual-reality headsets, daily filming-location hire. The place was used as a set for Anissa Bonnefont's film La Maison, with Ana Girardot, Aure Atika and Rossy de Palma.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterThank you, Eric
Thank you for passing on your devouring passions, the ones that make you want to create, take risks, imagine events that bring people together, where everyone feels, for a moment, that something unique is happening.
1 document(s) · Open the chapter
In the press