The Imagined Cinema

Making a Modern Cinema #2

In 2021, it’s been more understandable than ever to dream of a cinema, since even the ones sanded down by existing in the real world have been tantalisingly out of view. Separated from what they do best, I’ve found myself even craving the opportunity to fidget in my seat before anxiously asking another patron to turn off their phone. Being away from even the worst parts of the cinema has made it harder than ever to dream of something else, the cinema of what could be, to conjure it out of thin air and naivety. In the usual course of things, this is something I give all too much time to, adding little notes to my master Google Doc of ‘Cinema Ideas’, building an ever greater monument to impossibility. Whatever finer aspirations the last eighteen months might have offered us – some breathing space away from the relentless ‘just get it done’ pace of arts work – all predictions are that we’ll come back to straightened circumstances. Conventional thinking is that we’ve got to retain any innovations to our programmes we’ve made over the last few months (Online screenings! Improved access!), while also pressing harder on our existing audience to make up for the massively reduced capacity, by feeding them a steady diet of familiar fare. A new chimera of online and offline provision, struggling to get to the same ‘barely getting by’ that put a cap on ambitions pre-pandemic. It’s like we’ve all been strapped to Homer Simpson’s car, travelling a thousand miles an hour with no petrol. 

But if I can call on my inner primary school teacher, to put reality’s pressing demands away from a moment, ask you to lie on the floor, close your eyes and try to imagine. 

You’re in a new city. Maybe you’ve wandered off from a conference. No one will miss you, no one will not profit from you enduring what the conference had in store; the demands of your usual life are a million miles away. You start wandering the streets. You spot a bar on a relatively busy city street. You’re hoping for a drop of the local tipple, a place to sit while Googling the most obvious ‘things to do’ in the vicinity. You go to the bar. It’s all very local when it comes to what’s on tap. You ask the person behind the bar what’s worth drinking. They’re pretty informed but not pushy. You’re noticing there’s a distinct film theme to the décor. Lots of Polish alternate posters. It’s classy, but not somewhere you’d feel like a pariah for bringing a child into. There’s calm here, but not a hush. You sit back down and notice a leaflet on your table: it’s a programme of films. You realise you’ve been in a cinema the whole time. You take a flick through the leaflet. There’s plenty of films in there you’re familiar with but plenty of things you’ve never heard of. You log onto their website to get a bit more of a sense of the space and work out what’s playing today. You take a look at one of the films you’ve never heard of and there’s a short video by one of the programmers explaining why you need to see it, right now. You book a ticket (payment process is a dream, by the way) and take your seat in the screen, alongside forty or so other souls. An usher wanders around with a hawker tray and you buy a craft beer.  You’re surprised to see only a couple of trailers (and no ads) before the same usher comes out, introduces the film and says that they’ll be in the screen regularly if we have any problems. The screening has open captions. At first, you find it a little distracting, but after a little while you forget all about it. You leave the screen (you loved the film, all the more surprised you’d never heard of it), moving past waste recycling bins for all the different detritus. People are drinking in the bar, but you go off happy into the night. 

Some things you don’t realise on a flying visit, but if you lived there for a long time. If you don’t get around to seeing that little indie film in the first week, you’ve usually got a good chance of catching it again further down the road. You’ve been looking for a space for a community art exhibition and they have a back room that they lend out for next to nothing. Every couple of months there’s a local festival that fills out the already far-ranging regular picks. Whenever you buy a ticket, you have a chance to make a donation so someone who can’t afford it can come to the cinema. The tickets are generally available on a sliding scale with clear definitions about what price you should be paying based on your concerns about money. There’s a little shop, mostly selling vintage posters, secondhand and new film books and boutique home media. It’s reasonably priced.

So that’s the idea: a cinema with at least two screens, set within a community rather than at its edges. That commits to the films it shows, that shares its space. That has a bar that could compete on its own merits, but that is open to everyone in the community, whether they’re of drinking age or not interested in drinking at all. That’s accessible in terms of price, but does more than ‘continue existing’ to draw new people in. I haven’t cracked open my big box of ideas (I’ll save that for whoever wants to give me the money to start it), but that’s the broad strokes of what it does and how it feels. What will survive of what seems to be a fairly reasonable dream once people who actually know their business start telling me what’s what? Join me over the coming months and find out!