There's a woman who sits defiantly at the end of the same row in an arthouse cinema in London until the very last frame of the film's credits. She clearly believes that walking out before you have paid due respect to the mechanic who changed the oil in the DoP's trailer is tantamount to blasphemy. Any attempt to edge past her for the exit is greeted with body language that clearly screams, 'They shall not pass.'

Film buffs are a rarified species, so an attempt by the UK Film Council to classify movie buffery is an interesting exercise. The authors divide such film-goers into three clear character types: scatterguns, specialists and summits. Respectively, that's people who enjoy the occasional challenging film; those who go with a real depth of knowledge; and - here our picturehouse Pasionara fits the bill - there are people who should maybe try staying in a bit more.

For the industry, the latter is probably the least interesting. All power to their Halliwell's, but they probably have all the cinema that's good for them and more.

But for the rest, the study attempts to trace a pattern of movie-going that can perhaps offer a strategy for increasing audiences. The researchers find that most start off on easy mainstream fare but find themselves drawn towards the hard stuff. It is still commonplace to read how Star Wars was the point at which the mindless blockbuster took over from those greats of the 1970s - a completely ahistorical myth anyway.

It's a hard truth for some that a few of today's cinematic classics may be the bastard sons of Darth Vader. But this process of people first falling in love with the cinema and then learning to appreciate film in its greater richness sounds like a long-term business prospect for theatres.

It comes, however, with caveats. Arthouse is a meaningless category in terms of content - there's no linear evolution from blockbuster to art. Equally, there's no clear split between commerce and art unless we define art as intrinsically anti-audience.

Many film-makers engaged in studio films are well-versed in classical cinema or, indeed, are arthouse auteurs themselves. Equally, arthouse tends to be a broad bracket that hoovers up anything in a non-native - and particularly non-English - language.

A good number of local-language films currently enjoying local box-office success are as commercial in conception and ambition as anything from Hollywood, and hence have been arousing the interest of studio backers. Protection of that linguistic diversity is rightly a battleground for film. But from an industry viewpoint, arthouse is really a question of demographics and of distribution. Labels such as 'film buff' or 'arthouse' are really about niche audiences that are difficult to service in the economics of the multiplex.

This ought to be the age of the niche. Digital distribution to theatres and online is meant to make reaching demographics with a strong appetite for film, but who are inadequately serviced in an analogue world, easier. Yet the slow pace of change means few of those benefits have yet been realised.

At the same time, there are worrying trends that could disrupt the creation of the next generation of film buffs. Most obviously there is competition from other forms of entertainment.

But the dissipation of television content means that many young cinema-goers may not get the exposure to film that they once had in a world of less channel choice. How many of today's buffs will cite a television programme on network television that opened up the world of classic cinema'

Then there is the decline of the critic, which has been a big story in the US recently (see p23). The benefits of the democratisation of criticism online are not tied into the commercial realities of business, and the effect on attendance of a lack of exposure in the mainstream press has raised the ire of independent film-makers.

And finally the elephant in the D-cinema room: that a portion of smaller arthouse theatres will simply never be able to make the switch to digital viable financially, and may well go under. Given that there's little prospect of turning the tide, the realities of arthouse economics must be faced before the buffs hit the buffers.