Live Transmission Terminology - Text 1
The launch by the Metropolitan Opera of a regular program of capturing operas and transmitting them live to movie theatres brought about a diversification of content in cinemas. Following the multiple-camera practices used to disseminate opera live on television, the Met moved into the field of cinema and founded what the opera house and its marketing materials call “live movie opera transmissions,” “live performances” and “live in HD transmissions.”[1] In this way, the Met is underscoring the simultaneous and performative nature of the transmission.
Given the success with which these projections have met, other cultural institutions have followed in the Met’s footsteps, and we can now see on the big screen, in addition to opera, theatre, ballet, museum tours, concerts, solo performances, sporting events, e-sport and religious ceremonies. This diverse content complicates the definition of the live transmission by creating a hybrid phenomenon. Both the names for and the definitions of this phenomenon diverge depending on the culture and discursive community in question,[2] by which is meant industry professionals, institutional organizations or university communities. As we shall see further on, whereas French-speaking researchers highlight the heteroclite nature of the content in particular, their English-speaking counterparts emphasize the technological nature of the dissemination.[3]
The phenomenon is thus having trouble defining itself, given the choice of distinguishing it by its content, its means of dissemination or the simultaneous nature of the experience it provides. The particularity of any given content, as disparate as it may be by nature, lies in the fact that it stands out from the standard programming of movie houses, in which it is transmitted live. This phenomenon, as André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion describe, lies at the source of the French expression “hors-film” (“outside” or “apart from” film).[4] Gaudreault, one of the first scholars to become interested in the topic and to hang this name on it, includes the “hors-film” in the phenomenon “agora-tele,” which “describes every form of televised transmission (in the broad sense) shown in a public space, including... the various kinds of ‘non-film’ [live transmission] production.”[5] Rooted in this televisual framework, Gaudreault effects a break with certain content traditionally disseminated on other media, for example the Internet. Kira Kitsopanidou and Giusy Pisano, adopting a historical perspective, situate the phenomenon alongside “theatre television” and include in the concept live transmission all non-cinematic content transmitted to a movie theatre, including video games, but giving preference to the performing arts.[6]
In France, the relatively vague expression “hors-film” describes “cultural or sporting events projected in public on a large screen in movie theatres.”[7] The expression has been taken up by film funding bodies such as the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), thereby distinguishing it from conventional film production. On another note, the professionals working in the French industry mostly use the term “captation” (“capturing”), which has also been adopted by Gaudreault and Marion to describe the act of filming a performance as it unfolds.[8]
In the English-speaking world, a multitude of terms co-exist, some of which are associated with the nature of the transmission, such as livecasting[9], cinemacast[10] and Digital Broadcast Cinema.[11] While some of these terms do not necessarily reflect those used by professionals working in the industry, for example the Met’s live transmission or simulcast, several other terms used by researchers have been taken up by those working in the field. This is the case in particular of the term relay, which has been proposed by Frances Bonner and Bernadette Cochrane and taken up by the Royal Opera House in London.[12]
On the industry side, whether at the level of English-speaking producers, distributors or exhibitors, the term event appears to have taken on certain weight. To the extent that an association has been founded in England, the Event Cinema Association. The concept “event” also appears to have taken on some weight in the French-speaking world. It is used, for example, on the home page on the distributor of live transmission content Pathé Live, which describes itself as a “pioneer and leader in France in the dissemination of cultural events in movie theatres.”[13] It is also a concept that has been taken up in other fields of research, in particular by the sociologist Emmanuel Ethis, who describes cinema as “becoming more and more like the site of the event.”[14]
These various and differing names make it possible to consider the phenomenon with critical distance in order to propose a term in French which matches the receiving medium and the specificity of the mode of dissemination: “ciné-transmission,”[15] a translation of the English term cinemacast, which underscores both the kind of transmission (a broadcast) and the entertainment being adapted to the venue in which it is projected. Ciné-transmissions and cinemacasts are the conveyance in the form of digital data of a transformed non-film audiovisual object with a view to being projected in a cinema. These modulations make ciné-transmissions and cinemacasts a singular practice, making it possible to distinguish them from broadcast on other media, such as television, but also from recorded performances. In addition, by extension these terms define the simultaneous quality of the entertainment, because it is at once cinematic and live. They enable these screenings to stand apart from the television terminology which viewers often employ when they refer to opera transmissions in movie theatres.[16]
