CinEmotions

» see cinemotions.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

CinEmotions was not a company. It was an association under the French law of 1901, registered in 1994 and run out of an address on rue Kléber in Wattignies, in the Lille suburbs, and for twenty-four years it published film information in French: a database, release listings, posters, trailers, news about what was arriving on DVD and later on Blu-ray. Pascal Deroy and Frédéric Raes founded it and Deroy was still running it at the end.

That 1994 is the number that makes this one worth a page. There was effectively no French consumer web in 1994, and whatever CinEmotions was in its first years the record is thin enough that the French Wikipedia article carries a warning about leaning on primary sources. By the 2010s the shape of it was clear: a volunteer film database chasing the same searches as Allociné, with Google ads on the pages and a Facebook widget in the footer.

I came to this one entirely from the outside. Release listings are the most local thing a website can carry, and the point of CinEmotions was knowing what opened in French cinemas on a given Wednesday. The age gap does not help either: the association was registered when I was ten, four years before there was a modem in the house.

~ the record ~

~ twenty-four years ~

What kept it going that long was that it cost almost nothing to run and nobody involved was drawing a salary out of it. That also set the ceiling. Allociné had corporate money behind it and a redesign budget, and CinEmotions had an AdSense block and whatever the members put in. The last working version of the homepage still carries a line in its own markup noting that a video ad unit had been switched off on 13 February 2018, not quite four months before the end.

It had already closed once. The site shut in December 2017, and on 19 February 2018 Deroy announced that it was coming back, having possibly found a new partner. There was a Leetchi fundraiser running under a title that translates as for the return of CinEmotions.com. The reopening lasted under four months.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement went out on Facebook and Twitter on 7 June 2018. The tweet landed at 12:05 UTC, which you can read straight off the status ID without the tweet rendering at all, and the reason given was simply that the site was no longer able to support itself financially. The last ordinary capture of the homepage is dated 3 June, about 13 KB of film listings, four days earlier.

By January 2020 cinemotions.com was serving a this-website-is-for-sale page. Today it answers 401 from a server whose own copyright meta tag names a Japanese hosting company, so the name has been recycled twice over. Twenty-four years of French film data, and the last trace of the address is an authentication failure.

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