At a quarter to eight on a Thursday, Armand Descoteaux climbs the nineteen steps to his booth at the Cinéma Verrière, a 140-seat house tucked behind a bakery on the Rue Saint-Sauveur, and switches on a lamp older than most of his audience. He is seventy-one. He has projected films here since 1977, and in that time the building has changed owners four times, lost its balcony to a fire and gained a bar that serves only one red wine. The projector has not changed at all.
The Verrière is one of perhaps a dozen cinemas in France that still screen exclusively on film. When the industry converted to digital projection in the early 2010s, most independents took the subsidies and sold their machines for scrap. The owner at the time, a retired schoolteacher named Paulette Grimaud, refused on grounds she described in a letter to the local council as aesthetic, moral and slightly spiteful. The letter is framed in the lobby, beside a poster for a Czech comedy nobody remembers.
Descoteaux's work begins hours before the audience arrives. A feature arrives in five or six heavy canisters, each holding a reel of roughly twenty minutes, and he splices them together on a long bench under a green lamp, checking every join for tears, scratches and the small cue marks that tell him when to change over. He works in silence, wearing cotton gloves, with the radio tuned to a station that plays only chamber music after six.
Digital is a photograph of a film. What we show here is the film itself, with its dust and its heartbeat. People feel the difference even when they cannot name it.
A new audience in the third row
What surprises Descoteaux is who now fills the seats. For decades the Verrière survived on a loyal, greying clientele of cinephiles who came for Tuesday retrospectives. Since roughly 2022, the Friday screenings have sold out weeks ahead, and the queue along the Rue Saint-Sauveur is dominated by people in their twenties, many of whom have never seen a film projected from a reel. They photograph the booth window. Some ask to see the splicing bench, and he usually says yes.
The current owner, a former sound engineer named Béatrice Lalonde, credits the texture of the image rather than nostalgia. Film grain, the faint flicker of the shutter, the occasional pop of a splice: to an audience raised on flawless streams, these imperfections read as evidence that something physical is happening in the room. Lalonde has resisted the temptation to capitalise too loudly. There is no merchandise and no loyalty card, only a handwritten programme pinned to the door each Monday.
The economics remain precarious. Prints are increasingly hard to source, and the few laboratories still striking new copies charge prices that would make a studio accountant wince. Lalonde borrows from archives in Bologna, Brussels and Lyon, and relies on a small network of collectors who lend their prints in exchange for free tickets and, occasionally, dinner. Spare parts are the other anxiety. When a gear in the second projector failed last winter, the replacement was machined by a retired watchmaker in Besançon.
The larger question is succession. Descoteaux has trained two apprentices, a film student named Inès Karam and a former bike courier called Théo Marchetti, who now run the Sunday matinees between them. He watches them from the back of the booth with the posture of a man pretending not to supervise. Asked whether the craft will outlive him, he shrugs, adjusts the focus by a fraction and says only that the reels will tell them what to do.
