Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Belgian Royal Film Archive (Cinematek), Brussels.
(American Cinematheque), on the other hand, can’t imagine changing to
two- or three-month programmes. “If I publish a three-month programme,
I can’t guarantee an audience, and I can’t secure a commitment from guests
and speakers so far in advance of the programme.”
Extended Runs
Several of the larger cinematheques, with more than one auditorium
available, present selected films within the concepts of “extended runs” or
“exclusively limited runs”. These two concepts, which may originally signal
something opposite (“extended” and “limited”), in reality mean the same
thing: that a film is listed for daily runs, for typically a week or 14 days.
With regards to the other film programmes, it is decided beforehand how
many runs a single movie is given. The reason why they
break with the normal cinematheque principle – to screen
a film only once or twice – is first and foremost because
local distributors increasingly do not import a number
of interesting foreign films. In this way, cinematheques
contribute to expanding the cinema repertoire. In addition
to this, the films shown every day for a week will in most
cases get press coverage and be reviewed. In this way,
the cinematheques hope to attract new audiences, who
are also expected to take an interest in the rest of the
programme. However, the cinematheques do not only
show new films as “extended runs” but also re-released
classics. Often extended runs of a classic or a new film are
combined with retrospectives on the directors in question.
In this vein, BFI Southbank presented Some Came Running
in relation to a Frank Sinatra series; The 39 Steps as a prelude
to films featuring the actor
Robert Donat; and Jules et Jim
was shown for 14 days as part of
a focus on Jeanne Moreau.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Furthermore, BFI Southbank
was very successful with the
re-release of Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Profession Reporter/
The Passenger, which brought
in £45,000 in two weeks –
during the world football
championships, too, when other
cinemas sold very few tickets.
BFI Southbank moves the films
in question around their three
auditoriums. The last two or
three days of such BFI runs are
shown in NFT 1 (450 seats),
because experience shows that
the public’s interest peaks just
before the film is removed from the programme. Cinematheque Ontario
in Toronto also has had good experiences with “exclusively limited runs”
of both new and classic films. Alongside a Godard retrospective, the
cinematheque successfully presented both Pierrot le fou and La Chinoise as
“limited runs”. In Toronto you don’t buy the rights to the films in question;
17 Journal of Film Preservation / 81 / 2009