Inside Eye - the Independent - 3.8.89

The writer ran the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road for 13 years and is now the general manager of the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead.

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IN Citizen Kane, Orson Welles thought that it would be fun to run a newspaper, and I suppose for the same reasons 25 years ago, I thought that it might also be fun to run an independent cinema. A quarter of a century later, it is still fun, although not according to the standard dictionary definition of that word. Sam Fuller memorably defined cinema as a battle-ground of the emotions, and I would define the business that might occasionally be tempted to show retrospectives of his films as constant and exhausting armed combat between hopes, ideals and practicalities.Signor Jordan, the proprietor of the "Cinema Splendor", on the other hand, gives no suggestion of having spent a lifetime running independent cinemas. He seems completely unaware of the intricate balancing act required. Despite the posters of crowd-pulling films by Fellini and Bergman that scatter his movie theatre's walls, Jordan still launches an interminable and obviously doomed Russian season. I can sympathise with his desire to show Soviet films, but at the Everyman any specialist season is balanced off with a commercial fixture. And disasters are still not unknown. Last week we showed a revival of an Italian film called We the Living that flopped appallingly. This week we smartly replaced it with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a current commercial success.

 

The spirit of The Smallest Show On Earth, a comic story of a little fleapit doing battle against the circuit giant just around the corner, though based in the 1950s, has infinitely more relevance to the independent cinema world of the 1980s than Splendor. Scola seems mainly interested in nostalgia and his message is an apathetic one. What he ignores is that while the enemy may still be waiting at the gates, it is no longer a battle of cinematic Davids and Goliaths. Despite the "Philistines" who still believe that an addition to a chain of hamburger joints, car parks or office blocks is an enrichment of our lives, the independent film audience, in this country anyway, is a growing one.

 

My advice to Signor Jordan would be to stop staring into space, waiting for the cinematic miracle that neatly parallels the happy ending of that old movie you showed last week. With an attitude like his, a fantasy ending is all one can expect.

 

Splendor also seems to be misled about the past. Its characters are cocooned in rose-tinted nostalgia about an era when auditoriums were full and queues wound round the block. My most vivid memory of the past, however, is of going down to the Law Courts in the Strand early one morning, clutching a briefcase containing the £2,000 in cash which would stop VAT officials from closing down the cinema I was running at the time. The money was the weekend takings from a very successful screening of Bertolucci's Before The Revolution and I certainly thought that the cinema should stay open — if only to show it again.

 

Peter Howden