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.

Eric Vauthier turned that passion into a profession and a cause. A photographer by training, he founded La Rétine de Plateau with Michel Culot very young: a non-profit that brought cinema and its venues to life. “We try to show films the way their authors would have dreamed,” he said at twenty-four. He created the Lundis du Stockel, the Jeudis du Movy, the Nuits du cinéma at the Métropole, the Nuit de l'Automobile at the Eldorado, Koyaanisqatsi screened at La Monnaie.

He fought for the Métropole, the Variétés, the Pathé-Palace. Then he did what nobody else was doing: listing Brussels' cinemas before they vanished. Two to three hundred venues retrieved from the archives, published in 1995 in an inventory that became the reference. The photograph above shows him exactly there, torch in hand, on the revolving stage of the Variétés.