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27 September 2012updated 05 Oct 2023 8:50am

Why are cinemas disappearing from our high streets?

Picture houses used to be at the heart of communities; now they're almost invisible

By Ryan Gilbey

 

How encouraging that film exhibition in the UK is no longer facing the threat of extinction that loomed in the 1980s. Back then, the video revolution ate into audience numbers with its big, chomping top-loader mouth, and many towns woke to discover they were in possession of a brand new bingo hall, but were also one cinema the poorer.

So audiences are going to cinemas now. But where are the cinemas going? The dominance of the multiplexes has had the strange effect of pushing the cinema into the closet — or, more accurately, into the shopping centre. I’m not here to take issue with the mall multiplex, a phenomenon that began in the US, or with its occasional technical shortcomings, poor staffing issues and so on. But what its popularity has done is to remove cinema from the physical architecture of our towns and cities. Oh, there are exceptions — the Curzon, Everyman and Picturehouse chains, as well as thriving cinemas such as Brighton’s Duke of York (now owned by Picturehouse) or the Glasgow Film Theatre — but for the most part it remains an exotic experience to drive or walk through a town outside London and actually pass a cinema. A functioning cinema, that is. With a marquee [a text display of the films showing above the entrance of the cinema].

A director described to me recently the disheartening feeling each time he turned up to introduce films or conduct Q&A sessions at a US cinema, only to find that each one was in a mall, or nestled within some concrete structure not visible from the street. We tuck most of our cinemas away now as though we are ashamed of them. Many of the others are derelict and/or barricaded (like the much-fought-for EMD cinema in Walthamstow, which I have written about here before), or else remodelled into other businesses (such as the gym on London’s St Martin’s Lane, WC2, which was once the city’s plushest arthouse venue, the subterranean Lumiere Cinema, where I used to go to see first runs of Peter Greenaway films — and, more importantly, to see disgusted patrons walk out of those same Peter Greenaway films).

Time presses on. And this is no lament for that fact. But couldn’t we make more of a fuss of the cinemas that we do have left? I’ll give you an example: my local Odeon, in South Woodford, east London. Admittedly I have a sentimental attachment to this particular cinema, since it was the site of many formative experiences for me from childhood (when it was The Majestic, and then the ABC) and throughout my adolescence. Even setting that aside, it’s hard for a cinema lover not to be appalled by the cinema’s recent decision to throw in the towel.

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Oh, it’s still open. But the posters, those titillating mementoes, are all out of sight, and the one display visible from the street shows some tatty standees behind a dirty window. Worst of all, the cinema has given up on its own marquee. Do films come and go so quickly now that there’s simply no point advertising their existence? I’m inclined to think it’s more about the move of cinemas toward anonymity, facelessness, anything but the demonstrative beauty of the art deco picture palaces.

I used to love the marquee display — those big, clunky letters strung up on the illuminated frontage so that the titles of the films could be seen from neighbouring postcodes. The spookiest sensation of all was when you emerged from the cinema after the last show on a Thursday night, only to find that all trace of the film which had just ended had been removed by the cinema employees, who had hung in its place on the marquee the title of the new week’s attractions. You had only your fragile memory of what you had just seen to prove you had even been there at all.

There’s no marquee now, just a message in capital letters that reads: check our website or call for listings. They could have saved even more letters, even more manpower, had they opted for a more candid declaration, something along the lines of Odeon: we can’t be arsed.

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