This has not been a great week. I feel rather like Walter on the receiving end from Steve Jobs (2015).
First I looked in the Picture House PH magazine. On December 8th their screening was to be All About Them / À trois on y va (2015) in their Discover Tuesdays slot. Then I checked the individual brochure for Picture House at the National Media Museum and found ‘Discover Tuesdays takes a break’. This film got a warm reception at the Leeds International Film Festival and is an enjoyable French comedy: French films do well in the art film market in the UK?
Worst was to follow.
I am waiting to see Hard to be a God / Trudno byt bogom (2013) which was voted joint number 14 in the annual Sight & Sound Poll. It was screened at the Sheffield Showroom in late August. I thought I could catch it in Leeds later. As a famous Julia Robert’s characterisation opined, ‘Big Mistake!’ To date there is not one exhibitor in West Yorkshire with the film listed for a screening. It is in PH for December 22nd, but again the local brochure has ‘Discover Tuesdays takes a break’. Are the cinemas all hired out by Kit-Kat?
The film is screening at the PH City Screen in York. However, it only starts after 8 p.m., and this is a three hour film. Problematic for train or bus, and even for car as the city Park and Ride closes down at 10 p.m.
Finally we have the re-issue of Doctor Zhivago (1965), admittedly on DCP. However when I checked with BFI Information [who responded promptly), they advised ‘It’s 4K as long as it’s in a cinema that has a 4K projector, otherwise it will be 2K’. So PH at the National Media Museum have 4K projection in Pictureville and 2K Projection in Cubby Broccoli. The single screening of this release is in Cubby! Added to this the screen in Cubby is about half the size of the one in Pictureville and Zhivago is definitely a large screen film.
Apparently all this is due to ‘live transmissions’ being accommodated in the programme. Roy has written at length about the problems this is causing. I tend to think that this sort of programming is here to stay, it is an important economic stream for exhibitors. But does it need to have such a disastrous impact on film programming?
PH has this Discover Tuesday and tend to place ‘art films’ in this slot. And they have Vintage Cinema on Sundays. Whilst some of their cinemas do have additional screening, for example City Screen in York, the tendency is for single screenings. Something similar happens at the Hyde Park Picture House, whose booking is done by PH: but the HPPH is more flexible. I have seen vintage films on Thursday and Saturdays there. This assumption that the whole audience can be accommodated at one screening is clearly ludicrous.
Meanwhile inexorable films like Steve Jobs, bland films like Brooklyn (2015), or accomplished films like Carol (2015), occupy screens for a whole week or longer. Roy refers to the 700 or so films that manage a UK release: there are many other which do not pass this hurdle. When these cinemas programmed on a repertory basis there were opportunities to see such films over several screenings and the variety of films was superior.
Part of the problem is that many film fans are content to see films at home on DVD or Blu-Ray. When I looked up Hard to be a God on the Internet I found a bevy of adverts/reviews for Blu-Ray. I rather hope that readers of this blog are convinced that cinematic viewings are superior. However, if you go along to the Everyman chain that will be debatable. And whilst the Vue chain is more like a cinema their irritating custom of leaving houselights partly on does not help. I know there will be disagreements, but DCP is in effect a high quality video projection: hence cinemas often get away with running DVDs and Blu-Rays rather than theatrical DCPs. Moreover I have yet to find a source that consistently provides the information as to whether a release is in 2K or 4K DCP. If enough film buffs actually made their views known to the distributors and exhibitors we might stem the tide to a degree.
The Case for Global Film 
Yet another well-justified complaint about the paucity of choice on the big screen nowadays. The Discover Tuesdays screenings I attended at the NMM were well-represented by film lovers of all ages but seem to be in the process of being wrapped up now. Similarly, the Odeon a few years back had something it called a Director’s Night (?) on Tuesday mainly for showing non-mainstream films which was quietly dropped and there is literally no opportunity to sneak anything in there nowadays not designed to be popular with the masses, although ‘Victor Frankenstein’ may break the mold here. I have shares in Cineworld which are doing very well, thanks, so that company and its uncompeting subsidiary Picturehouse must be, in some sense, giving the public what they want. It is not what I want though and the untimely demise of repertory cinema is something that affects us all on this forum. What can we do though, boycott Picturehouse ? I am a frequent visitor to London and the Curzon chain is similarly in decline. Only the ICA and the dear old BFI seem to forge their own path.
LikeLike