Big-screen HD televisions, piracy, on-demand streaming services, poorly-behaved audiences, high ticket prices, etcetera, etcetera.
At one point or another over the last decade or so, each of these factors (often in concert with one another) have supposedly conspired to bring about the death of cinema-going. And yet – in London at least – that same period has seen something of a minor boom in cinema-building, conversion and renovation.
It’s something I’ve pondered in the past, but this morning I came across a week-old RT of a relatively standard marketing message from the Empire chain’s Twitter account:
My first thought was to wonder where that leaves the fortunes of the Save Walthamstow Cinema campaign, who have been busily fighting to save the glorious old EMD/Granada building in E17 (a long overdue visit to their website reveals the great news that they’re working with Soho Theatre in the hope of creating a first class multi-use entertainment venue).
My second thought, however, was to marvel at just how many new cinemas had established in London (particularly the north-east areas), and how many older ones had been revitalised or expanded:
I’m sure there are plenty of others I overlooked this morning – the Arthouse in Crouch End has since sprung to mind, as has the Vue housed within Westfield Stratford, if you want to count such things – but this expansion of cinemagoing opportunity, in all its guises, is surely a thing to be celebrated. Isn’t it?
On a somewhat related note (as it’s more about the death of cinema as physical object, although it does touch on the decline of the cinematic experience), I will take this opportunity to very strongly recommend archivist/curator/theorist Paolo Cherchi Usai’s rather brilliant collection of aphoristic provocations and philosophical musings, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark-Age (BFI, 2001). Whilst studying for a Masters in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia a while back, I found his free-thinking approach so revelatory that I stuck a bunch of photocopied pages up in my room.
And since I ended up writing my MA dissertation on three Australian silent films – two of which are deemed very much lost – I’ll leave you with one of PCU’s little nuggets on the objective impossibility of ‘film history’ (from page 131 of the book):
Stephen Morgan 