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Roundtable : Editorial singularity, transversality of actvities : assets for the market?

Four video publishers reunited to discuss the theme "Editorial singularity, transversality of activities: Assets for the market?

Tuesday, October 12, 2021, 3:30 pm at the screening room Le Karbone. During the 9th edition of the Classic Film Market, the video publishers Potemkine, La Traverse, Milestone Film & Video and RE:VOIR have gathered for a roundtable discussion, in person and remotely via the ZOOM application, to highlight their activities in defense of heritage cinema through the publishing of films on DVD/Blu-ray. Moderated by Alice Leroy, lecturer-researcher and film critic, this meeting allowed the Classic Film Market audience to better understand the respective paths of these four publishers as well as the stakes of their respective work. 

"We often talk about editorial line, but I think we should rather talk about our own singularity," explains Gaël Teicher, founder and director of La Traverse. "A line is something straightforward that we follow stupidly without deviating from it. The whole publishing process is really a patchwork. And it also involves collective work, it's like a Potluck dinner." The editor present at the meeting details that video editing is not just the process of editing a film in physical format. There is a whole research upstream, the desire to dust off a little-known or forgotten film, the search for the rightful owners, the accompaniment during the restoration or even the promotion once the film is restored. Even if they work in the same field of video publishing, the four professionals have very different backgrounds, sensibilities and target audiences. The activity of RE:VOIR, for example, is based above all on the privileged relationship that the company maintains with the filmmakers it publishes. It’s a niche market, and experimental cinema "is not really profitable" according to Pip Chodorov, his founder and director, but it obviously finds its aficionados. "Our first production was a Jonas Mekas DVD box set that we were able to distribute in Fnac with the means at hand. I was happy that it was next to Méliès box sets in the store's shelves." For Potemkine films, it's the relationship with cinephiles that's most important, and this ability to forge links in order to create a community of loyal followers. Nils Bouaziz, Founder and Director of the company, explains that it all started with a request from a customer in his store, which opened 15 years ago, who wanted to buy Come and See, a Russian war film from the 1980s directed by Elem Klimov, which had never been released in France. "A cinematographic uppercut in the face like you take 10 times in your life", says the publisher. Since then, the publisher has found its belief: to enlighten films that are difficult to find in France and to establish itself as a conduit for its clientele, which over the years has become a loyal community. Finally, Milestone film, a publishing house established in the USA, has affirmed its position of working closely with numerous archival companies in order to unearth rare films and reissue them to a wider audience. 

In an era of increasing dematerialization of artistic and cultural media, these four video publishers have had to diversify their activities in order to continue to exist but also to adapt to a constantly changing market. In 2021, RE:VOIR created a video platform that hosts the films in their catalog. A project that took them three years of preparation. For their part, Milestone Film & Video also launched their streaming platform, taking advantage of the fact that "the whole world stopped spinning in 2020" as Amy Heller, co-founder and president of the company, explains, referring to the global Covid-19 pandemic that has seriously impacted the audiovisual and film industry. "One right holders for one film is no longer enough," Gaël Teicher details. "We have to try to open several doors on the same work." Movie theater, VOD, physical format, derivative books, re-releases... Publishers must today multiply the support to finally manage to be "a profitable and survive a minimum", as Nils Bouaziz confirms at his side. The latter concludes by explaining that today the physical support is more than ever "established" and thinks that "it will last a long time". According to him, the physical object becomes a collector's item that gathers cinephiles with different profiles. There is this notion of sharing, of rarity around a medium that is too often wrongly qualified as outdated. During the traditional Q&A session with the audience at the end of the meeting, a spectator asked the thorny question about the age of the filmgoers concerned by heritage cinema. Nils Bouaziz replied tit for tat: "This year, we screened Rouge by Krzysztof Kieślowski, which we will re-release in theaters. The average age was between 20 and 25. These young people, of whom you speak, are indeed responding."

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