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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
PhD Thesis Project - ‘Cineforum 2.0’. The Digitization of Movie Theatres: The Case of Lombardy’s Sale della Comunità
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Projects & Abstracts
2017-03-01
2021-09-06
2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Francesca Monti
2017/03/01
Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM
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PhD Thesis Project - ‘Cineforum 2.0’. The Digitization of Movie Theatres: The Case of Lombardy’s Sale della Comunità
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‘Cineforum 2.0’. The Digitization of Movie Theatres:
The Case of Lombardy’s Sale della Comunità
Francesca Monti / PhD Thesis Project1
Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM, Milano




   My research project investigates the process of digitization from the perspective
of small Italian cinemas.
   From its initiation in 1999, the transition to this new system of projection has
been neither immediate nor particularly evident. In fact, one of the characteristics
of this ‘silent revolution’ is the limited collective perception of change, since
digital devices are configured as homologous to 35mm projectors. As such they
do not provide a different kind of film experience, but the improvement — in
terms of higher image definition on the screen — of an continued situation that
was pre-defined. Thus, cinema changes in its substance, replacing traditional reels
with hard drives, but not in its nature of experiential form. Following a decade of
limited success, Hollywood major studios began to encourage the acquisition of
digital projectors in view of renewed 3D technology, and the turn, announced in
2011, to adopt exclusively the digital format Digital Cinema Package (DCP) from
1 January 2014.2 As of 2012, the state of Italian single-screen cinemas was critical:
the big chains present in the country had already completed the conversion,
while many small independent circuits struggled to support the expenses
needed for the upgrade (around €60,000 just for the projector) before 2014.3
   After a section on the stages of digitization of the cinematic medium, and its
parallel theoretical debates, the third chapter of my thesis intends to address
another key question. Screen conversion in fact contributes to a process of
change that originated as early as the eighties: the loss of a central role for movie
theatres in cinematic fruition. Threatened by new forms of home video and
mobile devices (what Francesco Casetti has defined as relocation4 of film) on
the one hand, and by the loss of the specificity of the medium within broader
contexts of consumption on the other, movie theatres had to redefine their status


1
  PhD Thesis supervised by Professor Luisella Farinotti. For information: francesmonts@gmail.com.
2
  David Bordwell, Pandora’s Digital Box. Films, Files and the Future of Movies (Madison: Irvington
Way Institute Press, 2012).
3
  Rapporto 2013. Il Mercato e l’Industria del Cinema in Italia (Rome: Fondazione Ente dello
Spettacolo, 2013).
4
  Francesco Casetti, ‘L’esperienza filmica e la rilocazione del cinema’, Fata Morgana, 4 (2008), 23–40.

                                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                          Francesca Monti


and reformulate their relationship with the audience. Could they still be places
for sharing a common experience, in spite of the scattering that has affected
cinema? It is not by chance that both digital projection (along with the end of
film distribution) and the disappearance of traditional movie-going places have
influenced the idea of the ‘death of cinema’.
   I chose to investigate a uniquely Italian form of cinematic exhibition, the Sala
della Comunità, i.e. the basic element of Catholic film theatre circuits. Here,
screen conversion takes place not only as a technological process, but also as
a cultural one. In fact, to study the digitization of Catholic circuits means to
investigate the economic difficulties of an activity which cannot be classified as
commercial, and moreover to question the relationship between this religious
institution and the ‘seventh art’. Before analysing the process of transition,
through interviews with selected operators, this thesis seeks to reconstruct the
history of Italian Catholic cinematic exhibition. These sites were born as parish
cinemas in the thirties, and by the sixties they accounted for around half of all
Italian cinema screens.5 In the eighties, the push for a renewal of the ecclesiastical
institution leads to a new approach to the secular world. Catholic theatres were
redesigned according as cultural centres, with a deep transformation of their
identity. This change included recurrent strategy planning within discussions on
digital projection in two areas: flexibility and multiprogramming. The aim of the
research is to verify whether the terminological homology could be a semantic
one too: could digitization be a tool to achieve these goals, which are inscripted
within Sale della Comunità’s project?
   The selection of theatres comes from a single region — Lombardy, in Northern
Italy — which has always played a leading role in comparison to other regions
around the country. Lombardy was a pioneering region in the use of cinema as
a tool for pedagogical and pastoral purposes, as evidenced especially in studies
conducted by Edoardo Viganò,6 Raffaele De Berti7 and Tomaso Subini.8
   As Alberto Bourlot and Mariagrazia Fanchi have argued in their extensive
survey conducted in the early twenty-first century, the Catholic circuit is an
heterogeneous landscape, split between local exhibitors — which release movies
into peripheral districts and often constitute the only cinema available in those
areas — and more competitive realities, which try to differentiate their offer
according to different audiences’ needs.9 To give a preliminary indication of the


5
  Gianfranco Bettetini, ‘Chiesa cattolica e cinema. Dal Sessantotto a oggi’, in Attraverso lo schermo.
Cinema e cultura cattolica in Italia, ed. by Ruggero Eugeni and Dario Edoardo Viganò, 3 vols
(Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2006), iii, 71–102 (p. 80).
6
  Dario Edoardo Viganò, Un cinema ogni campanile. Chiesa e cinema nella diocesi di Milano (Milan:
Il Castoro, 1997).
7
  Un secolo di cinema a Milano, ed. by Raffaele De Berti (Milan: Il Castoro, 1996).
8
  Tomaso Subini, ‘Il caso de “La dolce vita”’, in Attraverso lo schermo. Cinema e cultura cattolica
in Italia, pp. 239–55.
9
  Alberto Bourlot, Mariagrazia Fanchi, La Sala della Comunità. Proposta culturale e intervento sul
territorio (Cantalupa: Effatà Editrice, 2004).

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                   ‘Cineforum 2.0’. The Digitization of Movie Theatres


diversity of forms and functions that are present on the territory: the sample
includes seven theatres set in Lombardy’s regional capital, Milan, and three
theatres placed in two towns with a population lesser than 200,000, Como and
Pavia. Despite the differences between them, the qualitative approach of my
research allows me to find recurrences among the testimonies gathered here.
For example, this kind of exhibition intends to present itself as a form of
resistance, not just to digital technology, but to what that symbolizes — namely,
the imposition of a right way of ‘being at the movies’ based on the multiplex
model. The experience of the Sale della Comunità develops around the ideas
of familiarity and informality, such that the themes of spontaneous meeting
and friendly atmosphere are used to mark the distance from the big chains of
movie theatres. However, the operators’ attention to additional content and
to the advantages offered by digital technologies seems substantially lacking.
Nevertheless, alternative content could constitute an important resource for
these theatres, that might help to deal with the scarcity of cultural products in
peripheral areas. Furthermore, the research demonstrates that the operators’
perception of the transition to digital allows for the exploration of original forms
of technological appropriation. And it demonstrates the persistence of an idea of
filmic experience in which feeling part of an audience is central.




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