Why Los Angeles Needs Movie Theaters
"People need art in their houses,” said Ezra Croft, American male artist. “They don't need Bed Bath and Beyond dentist-office art. They need weird stuff.” I encountered this quote on Tumblr and Pinterest, websites which offer proof that humans, like corvids, like to save shiny things that cross their path. I agree heartily with Croft, here. I’m even going to expand the scope.
People need art in their cities, and I mean WEIRD art. I’m talking about little cramped museums that store magnificent oddities. I’m talking theater in the park and poetry slams of dubious meter. And people need movie theaters. Especially if you want the future of filmmaking to have any life, any true weirdness, Los Angeles needs her cinemas.
Having lived in France, I adopted the French term for movie theaters. Also, it’s handy to distinguish between live theater and the silver-screen kind.
Call me a traditionalist, call me old-fashioned. Say that I can’t move with the times. But I say Los Angeles needs to preserve its theaters in order to nourish the current and upcoming generations of filmmakers. I mean, artistic inspiration doesn’t purely come from within.
The opportunity to stream films at home provides many advantages. I’m not disputing that. But the act of attending theaters with a live audience! Crafting images for the big screen! That art form should not die, nor ossify into a mass-produced cinematic universe of pablum, no, this art form should live, especially in the American home of filmmaking, the great city of Los Angeles.
In the first place, sometimes size matters. I speak from personal experience: swooning over the art of Alphonse Mucha for years online is as nothing compared to seeing Mucha’s art in person. All it took was one poster of Sarah Bernhardt as La Dame Aux Camellias, larger-than-life, in a French museum. The blue, the stars, the linework— they sank into me, resounded in me. I saw them in a whole new way. Now, apply that principle to film, which includes not only a dimension of light, but a dimension of sound and a dimension of time.
And there’s the matter of taking time out to really experience something in its proper mode. Every aspect of tangible, in-person moviegoing— chatting in line, getting the popcorn, the laughs and gasps of the audience around you in the darkness, the vastness of the screen that swallows you up— it forms a link in a sacred chain.
Attending cinemas together makes friends out of strangers. It reinforces bonds of community that already exist (think of a whole audience hollering “DAMMIT, Janet!” in unison). Unlike screenings at home among friends, lovely as they are, cinemas allow different groups of fans to mingle and compare notes. French New Wave-o-philes alongside lovers of the Chick Flick, Kung Fu aficionados arm-in-arm with Spaghetti Western cowboys.
Without big screens, the ability to experience films in their more-or-less intended context, how can young filmmakers stay linked to the history of their medium?
And we need independent cinemas. When I saw Encanto at an AMC theater in Century City, hand to God, there were a full ten minutes of AMC promos— Let’s show Coca-Cola pouring into a glass thirty feet high! Let’s review safety protocols in the most obnoxious fashion possible! Let’s remind you that you paid extra for the BIG SCREEN experience!— ten minutes of this, in addition to a battalion of promos for movies that ranged from “meh” to “this actively degrades the artistic landscape.” The in-your-face “Isn’t AMC great?!” promos almost spoiled my mood for the movie itself. We need independent cinemas.
Filmmakers need to be able to visit screens that are standalone— not attached to a shopping mall. There ought to be cinematheques that draw from the reels of bygone eras. There ought to be places to watch films from overseas, and the weird little films that pop up all over. The alternative is a shrinking box of regressive, simplistic, reheated properties.
Speaking of reheated properties, this December I’m hoping to see two remakes: West Side Story, which I’ve heard is good, and Nightmare Alley, a film by Guillermo del Toro. One promises to be a spectacle of movement and whirl; the other will immerse me in del Toro’s twisty vision. Color, dance, and rage; Labyrinths, mind games, carnival mystique. I want to be taken out of my own world; I want to experience catharsis and poetry. Because when the soul seethes, art is what provides the surgical lance.
That’s why, here in the heart of screenland, there must be a few houses remaining that serve up film in its original, intended environment. Which present film as art, not merely as content. Los Angeles needs movie theaters.