Theaters: Cinematic vintage magnified

Abstract

The pictures gathered in the photographic series Theaters are the perfect attempt to exemplify the challenging task to find a crystallised form to cinematic duration. Analog in their technique, they not only represent the impressed trace of an instant in which the authors freeze an existing referential index, but they actually feed the rich debate about the state of health of cinema by means of a classical metonymic procedure that addresses the architectural, material component of the apparatus to encourage a reflection on cinema in its multiplicity. Focusing in particular on its environmental aspect, the photographs invoke cinema as film culture (movie-going), a place (the movie theater), and an object of fond memories. Conceived by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre as an ongoing artistic reportage, the project started in 2005 with the aim of focusing on abandoned movie theaters located in the United States. A selection encompassing 30 of these shots was exhibited under the title Filmtheaters at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt am Main from 26 November 2014 to 15 May 2015. The exhibition is currently traveling throughout Europe (Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster in Ghent is hosting a new release from 9 October 2015 to 3 January 2016), though the Frankfurt initiative, which was designed in cooperation with Polka Galerie in Paris, marks the first time for the series as the object of a standalone exhibition. In Frankfurt the large-scale pictures were complemented with the screening of a 35mm film about the history of cinema in Germany, to be seen in a small screening room built ad hoc at the center of the exhibition space. Despite the lack of any introduction to the visitor, and therefore perceived as a bit disorienting at first, the film proposed a different and extremely interesting take on the cultural history of movie-going, producing a remarkable comparative perspective able to couple the same phenomenon in both America and Germany. Most likely envisaged as a way to bridge the temporary exhibition with the permanent one, this film somehow primed the visitor on the local history of movie-going; the Deutsches Filmmuseum approached this subject in a diverse exhibition area located in the same building, where an in-depth overview of the diffusion of cinematic places in the region from 1906 to our age is offered. The exhibition set also comprised some old-fashioned red velvet seats, establishing an explicit deictic continuity between the immaterial dimension of the photographs and the tangible spatio-temporal dimension of the