It was one morning in October 2005, after our friend Guillaume lent us his solid shoulders to access the emergency staircase… We were both in complete darkness for close to an hour already, waiting for the light of dawn to dimly illuminate the neo Gothic interior whitened by three decades of abandonment in the United Artists Theatre in Detroit. We were concerned about the success of our long exposures with our respective 35mm devices fitted onto frail tripods. This was our first foray into a movie theater, and our fascination with these venues was born there.
Back in Paris, and galvanized by our visit, we began to search for these “cathedrals of cinema” elsewhere in the United States. We quickly realized, thanks to Cinema Treasures, a website with a providential database on cinemas, that there was a barely discernible quantity of them, at a time when it was difficult to collect detailed information on the Internet. In October 2006, we departed on a journey of discovery of what was left of the movie theaters around New York, and we also went back to Detroit, equipped with a view camera that had been delivered a week prior via FedEx. Upon arrival, we were helped by the inexhaustible Orlando Lopes, former projectionist, local director of the Theatre Historical Society of America, and a true living history of these forgotten venues.
Yielding to the passionate logorrhea of our guide, defeated, the salesman of the clothing store located in the former lobby of Proctor’s Theatre in Newark finally let us in the abandoned complex through the back door. Climbing the steps of the vertiginous balcony, we were captivated and overwhelmed by the scale of the site… and the discovery of the delicate handling of the 4×5 view camera and its uncertainties. Later, we visited a gleaming furniture store in a Jewish section of south Brooklyn whose storage was located in the decaying auditorium of the Loew’s 46th Street Theatre. For us, used to visiting totally empty buildings, there was something incongruous in this state of in between — the dust of abandonment and the atmospheric-style interiors with an air of Mediterranean garden — alongside life as it pursued its course. The effect was even more striking the next day, when visiting the monumental Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn with its glossy basketball court in a monumental neo-Baroque and outrageous setting.
When the film industry began to take off at the beginning of the twentieth century, the reproducibility of the medium (which was already a primary form of dematerialization) allowed for a large-scale diffusion, and going to the cinema became a prime leisure activity. To charm the millions of spectators and “create the psychological conditions of dream and travel,” the major studios opted for seductive, eclectic décors inspired by the canons of the great European opera houses and theaters, adorning interiors with the formality of culture and luxury in order to gain legitimacy. Indeed, Marcus Loew, founder of Loew’s Theatres and of MGM, once declared, “I don’t sell tickets to movies, I sell tickets to theaters.”
The film industry and its movie theaters became mass culture: at once creators of and sites of diffusion for the American mythology, witnesses to and protagonists of the national narrative. But as soon as technology was able to allow the individualization of the means of diffusion with the arrival of television in the 1950s, the idea of movie theaters was in fact condemned to decline. Within a few decades, society shifted from a pastime whose experience was essentially still and collective to a condition of individuality and contemporary mobility; in short, from movie palaces with over 3,000 seats to our smartphones… When not demolished, these symbolic sites of American cultural identity have fallen into neglect, and many have often found themselves hybridized as storage space, stores of all kinds, supermarkets, churches, sports facilities, parking spaces, etcetera.
These repurposed theaters were therefore strange ruins, a form of subconscious memory, a chimera made of our past hopes and our current condition. Their décors constituted a form of over-framing of our everyday, which, instead of the stage, became the spectacle. This historical extension made of adaptation, reuse, and reappropriation thwarted our expectations for a romantic or apocalyptic ruin, which is something we could usually project on a “pure ruin” that would have no other symbolic function than to be ruin, like the ones we had visited until then. It almost seemed to us to be a form of demystification of the “classical ruin.” These complex relationships led us to various paths, titillating our spirit of deduction, questioning (even constraining) our imagination, and pushing us to reconsider the notions of decadence, historical conservation, morality, and aesthetics.
So, we set out in search of these venues in their state of metamorphosis. Hours and hours of prospecting online and on site through several stays and road trips. Announcing almost from the beginning of the series the coming of a book to whoever wanted to hear it… We finally devoted over fifteen years to this project, from venue to venue, from one request to the next, from one meeting to the following, alternating refusals and successes, but, above all, with many surprises. One photograph after another, one long exposure after another, often equipped with a halogen spot connected to a car battery to produce the lighting… With the indispensable help of the countless enthusiasts dedicated to safeguarding these monuments, and who granted us access to these movie theaters. We are deeply grateful for their patience, kindness, and passion. While our project obviously does not constitute an exhaustive inventory, we have humbly attempted to capture these near-subconscious memories with the hope that some of our images may someday contribute to refresh our collective memory.
YVES MARCHAND & ROMAIN MEFFRE
PARIS, 2021