Image by Chrissy Griesmer
Cinemas, In Memoriam, July 1 - 22
curated by Emily Apter, Annie Horner, and Inney Prakash.
“I’ll never forget the most beautiful Christmas ever. All the lights in the cinema were off except the candles on the Christmas tree. Then I poured some wine into two glasses, one for me and one for the cinema...And then we toasted to our future. We wanted to be together for the rest of our lives. We had these illusions.” – Carmen Martinek, Carmen (Anja Solomonowitz, 1999)
“In mid-April 1966 I returned from half a year in Europe. The talk was of a new Times Square: It would bloom like Lincoln Center. Walk along the Deuce, though, and you felt the shabbier and shabbier theater fronts holding their breath....” – Samuel R. Delaney, ‘Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,’ 1999
We have spent much of our lives in darkness, seated among strangers, gazing upwards without regret. A lack has left us yearning. Even as we find ourselves “going back” to the movies, we remain ever fearful of an irreversible decline. Eulogizers return to their posts to spell the final end of theatrical moviegoing. We have heard their cries before.
But perhaps such harsh, banal, and often dull pronouncements have never been useful, as there are always forces that govern cultures and conditions of moviegoing and that enable the life and “death” of public space. The above quote from Samuel Delaney, excerpted from the preface to his treatise on Times Square’s porn theaters, underscores the particular precarity of brick-and-mortar social institutions. He goes on: Like many young people, I’d assumed the world—the physical reality of stores, restaurant locations, apartment buildings, and movie theaters and the kinds of people who lived in this or that neighborhood—was far more stable than it was.
Longing for a return to movie theaters, we indulged ourselves in films that captured their allure. We also thought about the ways they’re inextricable from their social conditions—the displacement of communities in The Case Against Lincoln Center, historical migration trends in Dawson City: Frozen Time, the exploitation of labor in Occupation: Mill Worker, and the fetishization and erotics of space in Carmen, among others.
These are films that offered us solace and solidarity over the last year. They made us reflect deeply, sometimes hopelessly, on the existential and material crisis forever faced by cinemas.
They increased our awareness of the ways cinemas have at times represented the side of oppression and destruction, but they also pressed our belief in the possibility of cinemas as an actively resistant force.
What we long for is not the magic of a big screen and sticky floors alone, but for a people’s cinema, able and willing to shift its design and function in alignment with the needs of its community. As ever, we ask ourselves: is there a way in which the resilience of cinema might be bound up with the liberation of humanity?
We’re proud to present the premiere of Art Jones’s AWOKE (excerpt), featuring a 3D scan of Maysles Cinema.
New digitizations of films by Rudolph Burckhardt and Helene Kaplan were made possible in cooperation with The Film-Maker’s Cooperative and Negativeland Motion Picture Film Lab.
