I loathe large multiplex cinema, am left cold by "blockbusters" and "high concept" movies, and I would like to shoot whoever thought it was a good idea to take our cinemas out of our local commercial shopping strips, where they served as both an architectural and a local cultural landmark and community focal point, and decided to instead dump them into bland shopping malls. Along with post offices and town halls, cinema buildings served an incredibly important architectural purpose in constructing the civic identities of our communities. Just as it is a criminal shame that Australia Post has sold off all of their lovely old buildings and moved our post offices into bland retail premises in the local shopping malls, it is also a shame that our cinemas have morphed into "multiplexes" attached to horrid indoor shopping malls, with no individual (or redeeming) characteristics, and robbing us not only of characterful cinema buildings but also, frankly, of good cinema.
In recent years, several of my favourite old cinemas have closed: the Valhalla in Sydney and the Lumiere in Melbourne. Luckily, both cities still have many great stand-alone arthouse cinemas, and I concede that that is thanks in no small part to chains such as Dendy and Palace which saw the niche market for arthouse cinemas and operate several great cinemas in both cities as well as in Brisbane and Canberra. I frequent a number of cinemas in Melbourne, and I'm grateful for them: the Westgarth, Rivoli and Brighton Bay are lovely old cinema buildings that have survived by adding additional auditoria and showing a mix of mainstream and arthouse releases, and by surviving they provide wonderful anchors to their local shopping strips, as to the Balwyn, George and Sun cinemas also in Melbourne. I also go to Cinema Nova, Kino and Como, which all have good film selections but are located inside of shopping malls and have no street presence or architectural identify of their own.
In Canberra, where so many of my formative teenage years were spent going to see arthouse and classic revival movies at the Electric Shadows Twin Cinemas and the single-screen Center Cinema (in pre-Imax days the largest screen in Australia, which made it sublime for revivals of Doctor Zhivago and Gone with the Wind, and which was housed into a truly beautiful Enrico Taglietti building later converted into a nightclub), it was a sad event when both of these institutions closed in 2006 to make way for the Dendy multiplex, located within the gigantic Canberra Centre shopping mall. Dendy shows a mix of mainstream and arthouse films. Their 6 or 8 screen (I forget how many there are) are housed in rather bland auditoria that are undoubtedly more comfortable than the legendarily uncomfortable seats in Electric Shadows' long, narrow red and blue cinemas, although they are really no match for the deep 1960s chic of the seats in the huge old Center Cinema auditorium. What the Dendy lacks, however, is the character and the sense of intimacy, the sense of spontaneous camaraderie that arose with your fellow film goers for the shared experience of a great or awful film in those old cinemas.
Multiplex film going is a strangely detached experience, somehow seeming far more crass and commercial and less special than going to an aged, old, not very luxurious, but deeply authentic arthouse cinema where the quality of what was on the screen mattered more than the luxury of the surroundings or whether you could take your overpriced glass of wine in with you, where there was a lot more attention paid to getting the projection just right and the sound just right than there was to up-selling at the candy bar. The dominance of the multiplex has robbed us of something sacred in the film going experience.
I am very thankful that Melbourne still has so many independent, arthouse cinemas. They serve a wonderful cultural purpose, and of course a wonderful urban planning purpose as they often form the soul of a small, local shopping and dining street precinct, but these cinemas need not be relics: the James Street precinct in Brisbane is a relatively new development of shops and eateries centred around a covered food market and a freestanding cinema building; so maybe there is hope that the multiplexes have had their day? Down with the multiplexes!
