Eric Vauthier

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.

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.

The same year, in Watermael-Boitsfort at La Vénerie, Eric Vauthier created the Cinés-Apéros: the little sister of the Petits Déjeuners du cinéma Métropole. The format lasted forty years, every Wednesday, with Mirko Drag Popovitch's team. It was before the internet, before the fax.

To announce the screenings, a trailer was shot and then projected in Brussels cinemas, with Philippe Volter and Viktor Lazlo, directed by Jean-Pierre Berckmans, and more than a hundred actors and participants. Carl De Moncharline took part in it as a volunteer, alongside several well-known regulars of the Mirano. The clip has been found and will soon be digitised; it will be published here the day it exists.

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.

In 1988, Michel Culot, working within La Rétine de Plateau, the non-profit he co-founded with Eric Vauthier, decided to bring the American drive-in concept to Brussels. The chosen site was the Cinquantenaire park, under the arcades between Autoworld and the Musée de l'Armée: a screen of more than 300 m², parking for more than 250 cars, and the soundtrack broadcast on the car radio's FM band.

Every summer from 1988 to 2009, up to 15,000 filmgoers answered the call. The initiative lasted twenty-one years, marked its twentieth anniversary in 2008, held its final season in 2009, and was cancelled in 2010. Over time, Michel Culot's company, VO Communication, became an event agency with which Carl De Moncharline would later work, notably on the Mobilmix night.

Source: RTBF, “Cinéma et déconfinement : quand le Drive-In du Cinquantenaire attirait plus de 15.000 cinéphiles chaque été”, 24 June 2020.

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.

By 2001, he was already telling La Libre Belgique that cinema's second century would be digital, that films would dematerialise and that creators would have to think differently for the computer screen. One line from that interview sums up everything he has done: “Interactivity must serve the point.” Never effect for effect's sake. Always the idea first.

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.

Champagne was not decoration. What brought them together, once again, was craft: the creative work behind the contents of a bottle, exactly like the creative work behind a night. A mentor is not only someone who teaches a trade: he is someone who shows that a passion can become a body of work.

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.

“We must recreate cinema venues on a human scale,” he says today. Forty years apart, it is exactly the sentence of the young man who filled the Métropole on Sunday mornings. Some people change their minds with the times; he defended his until the times caught up with it.

Thank 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.

Those gatherings where the audience becomes an accomplice. Where an empty room, in the dark and silence, gradually becomes a living place, filled with energy and emotion.

And what more fitting than an old cinema like the Mirano to start my career, and to experience my very first great emotions in this profession?

Thank you too for forty years of defending cinemas and independent cinema, with passion, with conviction, never letting anything go.

Because, deep down, what you passed on to me is not only the desire to practice this profession. It is much more than that: it is the desire to share. Share a passion, an emotion, a moment, and above all, give others the desire to live it with us.