Vivendi

Rodolphe Buet, Executive Vice President, International Distribution and Business, StudioCanal (ASDR 2008)

« Managing a back catalogue as rich as StudioCanal’s, including prestigious films and directors like Senso by Luchino Visconti, À Bout de souffle (Breathless) by Jean-Luc Godard, and Carol Reed’s The Third Man –regularly studied in film schools and included in retrospectives around the world, and for which we regularly receive requests for excerpts and remakes by the greatest filmmakers–, is both a great privilege and a heavy responsibility. We must protect, restore, and adapt this priceless heritage to new use standards in order to allow the widest possible audience, including both professionals and cinema lovers, to access to them.
The new StudioCanal.com site is one of the levers of this policy, both for our new productions and also for our back catalogue. The site, available in French and English, has a wealth of editorial content. For the 2,000 films available online in 2009, it offers video, photos, press reviews, posters in different languages, excerpts and historic previews. Making works like Nana, Le Mépris (Contempt) and La Grande Illusion available to the general public in exceptional quality is an incredible opportunity to share this heritage. And “sharing” is one of the keywords of the project; what we want is for Internet users to enrich the film commentaries, blog the video clips, and publish their opinions and comments so that the site becomes a true forum for film buffs. This community function of the site, along with the multitude of entry points hosted by Studio’s product managers and by journalists, are a unique way of bringing these treasures of the cinema heritage to life and deriving value from them – for example through the purchases of our films on DVD and Blu-Ray or Video on Demand via partner sites when they are available in these formats. Walt Disney cited Georges Méliès as one of his major influences; Jean-Pierre Melville inspired, and continues to inspire, top directors like Johnny To, who will be doing a remake of Le Cercle rouge this year. By keeping our back catalogue vibrantly alive and broadening access to it, we contribute to the dissemination of the history of the cinema and to building its future, including through StudioCanal’s new productions. »