Six ideas for building a better cinema

What happens when I can't start the revolution at closing time

This is the third and final part of a series of thoughts for a new cinema. Read why cinemas need to break out of screen advertising here and drop blockbuster programming here.

During the pure unclouded days of Lockdown One, I’d occasionally receive an email from a contact that spoke of a desperate urgency. Behind it, I could sense a boss urging them to work harder and hit the targets they’d laid out at the beginning of the year. It’s hard to think of a more encompassing and urgent encouragement to break off business than usual, but people were clearly being pushed to double down rather than reassess. Yet I’ve also spoken to many more in the time since who are encouraged to do things differently (and equally feel dwarfed by the task in front of them). So, with six weeks or so to go until cinemas can reopen, here’s a few short ideas that have been on my mind in the space to reinvent the last year has offered me. Oh, and also if you don’t have a clear environmental policy you’re holding yourself to, all of the rest of this is irrelevant.

Make yourself genuinely available to your community

One of the common stated goals of independent cinemas is to be accessible to their community. One can dream of actively working towards that goal, by going into the community and explaining your work and how people can get involved. But in the absence of that, a bare minimum should be adding your company email addresses to your staff profiles. In the scenario that a member of the public has the idea that to put together a programme or forge a partnership, an impenetrable wall exists between that thought and the possibility of achieving it. If you don’t work in the industry, ‘programmer’ is not a clear term and has other associations. What can you do to bridge the gap between people with good ideas, strong connections but no industry experience and you, the people with expertise?

We talk a lot about gatekeepers, but a better analogy is of wall builders. Cinemas – consciously or not – do not even advertise that there is a gate. And while there are a chosen few who are admitted – those with personal connections, those with budgets, those with a proven track record i.e. people very much like those who are already in salaried roles in these institutions – there are many more with excellent contributions to be made, if they knew that there was a path to contributing. So, at a minimum cinemas should make their key staff available to enquiries. Almost certainly the first Google search after your institution’s name is ‘jobs’, so why wait until a hen’s teeth opportunity to get inside turns up? Part of your ‘work with us’ page on your website could be to explain you are open to being approached, what you’re looking to add to your programmes and what ways you like to work with outside groups. And if you don’t have a sense of those already, what kind of cinema are you running anyway?

Embracing Pay What You Can

Facing a global recession, audience hesitation and the absence of AAA box office gold, the cinema industry needs to look closely at its pricing model over the next few years. With ticket prices at galling peaks, audiences who have outfitted themselves very well for home viewing over the last 12 months could well choose to double down (or more likely, spend elsewhere on leisure activities impossible to replicate in the home). Pay What You Can models have a good body of evidence behind them, and promise to deliver new audiences. Pay What You Can works best with organisations that already have an established connection with their audience, and any indie cinema worth their salt falls into that category. It’s also another way for those in your audience who can pay to contribute to your building. Like blood donation (which tends to increase when its entirely voluntary rather than paid), giving people the option gives them a chance to choose their better angel and feel good about their choices. The best of both worlds! It’s just those pesky distributors we have to get on side.

Expanding the canon

After a year of statue smashing, it seems like the monuments of Western cinema are no closer to toppling. The pandemic is likely to lead to a new conservatism in programming, but I for one can’t see the running It’s a Wonderful Life, Die Hard or Citizen Kane (now with double bill with Mank as a sop to ‘shaking things up’) as a viable plan for repetory slots. Looking through the past programming of BFI’s Big Screen Classics programme reveals that twice as many Orson Welles films have been shown than films by any black director (as far as I can see – and the archive isn’t easy to access – there’s also never been a film by a non-Japanese or black person of colour shown in the strand either). Of course, there have been a lot of black films shown at the BFI (and they are not the only culprit here, just the one with the biggest platform and opportunity to do things differently). But very few are given the imprimatur of ‘greatness’. Siloed seasons are all well and good, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t more films than Shaft and Daughters of the Dust that slot into the pantheon. Adopting a ‘margins to the mainstream’ model, there are opportunities to introduce people to new works in these slots, to shake up not only the types of films that are considered great but also the narrow criteria of what ‘greatness’ is. Ashley Clark’s excellent BAM Cinema programme Beyond the Canon did the work of offering access to the classics on the big screen but then advocated (and contextualised) other forms of greatness. This is the work that cinematheques should be doing, rather than grasping tighter to a rigidly defined group of white male auteurs who rose up between 1945 and 1975. We should be advocating for why other films matter as well and shaping new canons.

Embrace captioned cinema

Having worked on Deaf cinema projects over the last few years, one of the biggest stumbling block is the availability of captioned screenings. I would be fascinated to see if any cinema would have the ambition to only show films with captions. Undoubtedly, there is work to do to educate audiences about this decision. I don’t doubt there are a lot of (ableist) complaints that cinemas would have to deal with, but like every decision a cinema makes, explained with confidence and commitment, it makes a case for who you are and who you want to see in your screens. It’s also worth bearing in mind that there are many communities who wouldn’t necessarily request captions but find them of benefit. Besides the hard of hearing, English speakers of other languages find subtitling very beneficial and these are the audiences independent cinemas should be seeking. If all films, all the time is too much, why not try one day a week where all shows are subtitled? Consistency makes a huge difference in audience development and this ‘meat free Monday’ approach rather than full veganism is within reach for most cinemas.

Rejecting declinist narratives about cinema

This one is not for cinemas, it’s for people who write and talk about cinemas. When we go back, it’ll be tempting to write endless articles about how cinema is doomed, hasn’t bounced back, is being overtaken by new streaming tastes, has no content ad nauseam. The Guardian – written by and frequented by people who like to think their quaint, nostalgic way of life is under threat – is a particularly bad actor when it comes to these pieces. It’s not so much the pieces themselves – though they often don’t bother asking anyone who work in the industry – but the fact they paper over a more substantive discussion of issues. Unless a technology is utterly superseded, it’s never fair to paint a single picture of decline. In the absence of useful figures from streaming companies (except those that boost their shareholder confidence and paint a story of perpetual success) and despite reports of booming box office, we instead receive stories of cinema’s death knell on the regular. As I’ve written, key parts of the cinema world are at risk; the picture is changing and solidifying; but asking the same three or four people with vested interests to comment endlessly isn’t going to help us realise an accurate picture and make a change.

Lay out your agenda

Over lockdown, cinemas had cause to go to their constituents, asking for help and support (as well as offering it to them in some cases). My biggest takeaway from those fundraising drives was that the cinemas who had built a strong proposition for who and what they’re for were the ones who could rely on the most public support. This isn’t just something you put on funding applications or annual reports. This is about accountability to the people you’re trying to reach with your work. This proposition should be transparent enough that anyone can understand it. That’s hard work to do, but the things you’re working on should be able to written concretely. I really admire the way that Watershed have regularly updated on their progress on anti-racism work. That’s a complex, knotty, painful thing to address, that requires a lot of uncomfortable self-reflection. Ultimately, though, it needs to settle into actually doing things. Why wouldn’t your audience want to know about that? And if you are clear about what you’re for, you’re more likely to attract like-minded people – staff, volunteers and audience members – to your cause, all of whom might have useful ideas or critiques on how to do it differently.

If you like these articles, or want to talk about the issues and how we can do more, drop me a line at carson.duncan@gmail.com. Always happy to talk in confidence with anyone with change on their mind.