The pick of auteur directors from across the globe handed the world's premier film festival a joint 60th birthday present on Sunday, a collective work on cinema.

But 'To Each His Own Cinema', a two-hour work of three-minute clips on cinemas by 35 top film-makers, also raises a host of questions about the future of movie-going in the world of digital small screens and the internet.

Some contributions celebrate Cannes for fashioning a place in the history of film since its first war-aborted edition in 1939.

Oscar-winner Roman Polanski for instance has a middle-aged couple out to see erotica disturbed by the groans of the only other movie-goer in the cinema. It turns out the man fell out of his balcony seat above, and is hurt.

The Coen brothers, US Oscar winners too, send the star of their latest Texas-set thriller showing at Cannes — 'No Country For Old Men' — to an arthouse cinema wearing his cowboy hat where, in an unlikely choice, he buys a ticket for Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's festival film 'The Climate'.

Brazil's Walter Salles, of 'The Motorcycle Diaries' fame, features two rappers outside a run-down village movie-house singing to Cannes. "It's a small deserted fishing village and the village chief is Gil".

"Gilberto Gil?" asks one. "No, Gil Jacob", says the other in honour of Cannes festival president Gilles Jacob.

Other contributors, such as Takeshi Kitano, zoomed in on cinema-houses that highlight old memories.

Kitano's three minutes shows a middle-aged man turning up at a lone cinema in the middle of the countryside and asking for a specially-priced "farmer's ticket".

Not surprisingly the rusty equipment and old spools break down repeatedly, with the man smoking cigarette on cigarette before going home at dusk without having seen one entire movie.

Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-Hsien remembers cinema outings of his childhood in the urban 1950s while Chinese director Zhang Yimou harks back to village screenings at the same period using tiny generators and small screens.

But David Cronenberg wonders about cinema-going tomorrow in his piece, titled 'At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World'.

"The form of cinema as we have known it is already a thing of the past," the director said at a media conference on Sunday.

Likewise Britain's Ken Loach, while saying his contribution was not intended as a statement on the future of film, showed a father and son queuing up for a ticket but unable to decide between the B movies on offer. They finally opt to go to the football instead.

And in his three minutes, Italy's Nanni Moretti reluctantly agrees to see a Hollywood blockbuster — 'Matrix' — with his seven-year-old.

Among other contributors are Aki Kaurismaki, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Lars Von Trier, Andrei Konchalovsky, Gus Van Sant and Wong Kar-Wai.