Vue Cinema, Finchley Road

Not to make a trend of visiting Vue exclusively, but as with the last cinema I again went to a branch of the second largest cinema chain in the country.

This one, however, just outside the station at Finchley Road in the O2 centre, was a far more pleasant experience than the Vue in Harrow. It is the first time I have been to this particular branch. The entrance way is a grand one and very inviting to the cinema, and the screen itself didn’t have issues with picture or sound in the way I experienced last time.

It was a very large screen with comfortable seats, and the sound quality was very strong. There is not too much to say beyond this, maybe confirming the fact that the ‘experience’ of multiplex cinema-going has little to offer as opposed to independents that I am planning to frequent more with this challenge.

2 February: 4/50 cinemas.

P.S. If anyone is interested, I saw Shame. I did not like it.

Profile: Bradford New Victoria

As well as looking at new cinemas and exploring their experience, in this blog I also want to write more detailed profiles of other cinemas, either that are no longer functional as cinemas or have been closed down altogether.

One of the most well known cinemas to have closed down to quite a stir was the Bradford New Victoria (although some may know it as the Gaumont or the Odeon; it has had many names throughout its time). The New Victoria  was the largest cinema in the city and the third largest in England at its time of construction in 1929. The cinema was full every night for years but due to a decline in sales was closed in July 2000 with the intent to demolish the building to construct a hotel. An invited guest in the final audience was 77 year old Norman Scurrah who as a 7-year old boy had been brought to the opening of the New Victoria in 1930.

Despite casting a public vote which fell in favour of keeping the building, the council continued to try to knock it down. The Bradford Odeon Rescue Group (BORG) was formed to stop this, and thanks to their campaigning the cinema is still standing eleven years later, although still in a state of decay.

In the present day, the New Victoria is a sad and destroyed building in the centre of the city. Signs stuck to lampposts proclaim that Bradford is the “City of Film”, but its hard to see how that’s true when looking from the sign to this old building. This title was given to the city by the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) in June 2009, and was in fact the first city to be given this honour. Sydney, Australia, is the only other city to have received such an accolade, having done so in November 2010.

According to the UNESCO website, the criteria for a city being considered are:

• Notable infrastructure related to filmmaking, i.e. film studios, cultural/movie landscapes, cinematographic memorabilia, etc;
• historic links to the production, distribution and commercialization of films, especially within a native/local and culturally relevant context;
• cinematographic legacy in the form of archives, museums, private collections and/or film schools;
• tradition of hosting film festivals, screenings and cinematographic events;
• birthplace, residence and/or workplace of creators and artists in the film industry;
• depiction of the city in films, preferably realized by native creators and artists;
• existing films about the city.

The Bradford: City of Film official website declares that the city is

home to a fabulous film heritage, world-class festivals, stunning locations and film’s national museum at its heart. Renowned nationally and internationally, by 2020 this gem in England’s north will be synonymous with film, the definitive destination for anyone wanting to enjoy, learn about, make or visit because of film. Whatever your interest – from personal to professional, casual to academic – you’ll find what you’re looking for here. From absolute beginners to budding Bollywood stars, Bradford City of Film invites you to share our love affair with the big screen.

It does, of course, have the National Media Museum as I mentioned in a previous post, and is home to the UK’s first IMAX. There are over 34 commercial screens within the city, and has had many features shoot in the city from The King’s Speech to The Railway Children and Billy Liar; in fact there are 291 locations in Bradford listed on the Screen Yorkshire database.

To get back on topic: despite all the benefits that can be said of Bradford as a City of Film, it is undeniably unfortunately that a once great and vibrant cinema that sits in the city centre is left in such a state of disarray.

Vue Cinema, Harrow

The Vue Cinema in Harrow is my local at university. It is situated inside a shopping centre, with shops below and around it and fairly nice restaurants either side of it. I have frequented this cinema many times, having either come straight from home to see a film, or come from a meal with my family, or the pub with friends. All these different kind of journeys in their own way add to the experience of the film. Making the cinema more of a ‘night out’ when dealing with a multiplex chain such as Vue is necessary, because when you get to the cinema itself there is a small chance that the cinema itself will make any effort to offer an ‘event’.

Going to this mutiplex reminds me of an article I read on The Telegraph website by Bernadette McNulty, who writes in a modern multiplex “unmanned machines spew out tickets and chemically enhanced snacks while elevators transport you to hi-tech black caves where digital films leap out in 3D.”^[1] It is interesting that she refers to the cinema screens themselves as ‘caves’ as it demonstrates how sparse and uninteresting the room itself is in the modern multiplex. This certain is the case in this particular Vue where the foyer consisted of huge arrows directing us to ticket sales, and signs informing us of the price of popcorn and ice-cream (but, actually, nowhere that tells us the price of the cinema tickets – which were an astonishing £9.60 at this cinema, over double what I paid at each of the last cinemas I visited).

No, I wasn’t going to get any kind of grand experience in the foyer. And I didn’t expect much of the screening room itself.

The screen I was in (7, for anyone whose interested) was in fact the same one I had been in when I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. When I saw it, the screen projection was stretched so that it appeared to be widescreen 16:9, rather than anamorphic 2.40:1. This went on through the adverts and I assumed someone would correct it before the film started. Alas, the projectionist (actually, there probably wasn’t a projectionist in this now digital screen as they press ‘play’ on the projector and leave us to it) was not paying attention, nor any other employee, and no-one else in the screening either seemed to notice or could be bothered to get up to sort it out. It wasn’t until someone from my group got up and asked someone in the foyer that the film was projected properly.

As as you may have been able to see where I was going with that story, we also had problems during last night’s screening of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The right-hand speaker was peaking at a far lower volume than it’s left counterpart, and as such whenever the sound got to a certain level or a specific note was hit in music, it burnt the sound horribly. It happened once during the adverts which I had hoped was a horrible copy of the trailer but unfortunately it also happened during the screening which did, of course, take you out of the screening someone (as did someone’s phone going off half way through the screening, do people just not watch the Orange: Turn it Off ads anymore??)

So yes, this may have not been the best cinema experience one could hope for. This being said, the digital projection did give a good, crystal clear image that could not be complained about. But the thing about these multiplex chains is that they are simply there to make money, not to offer the customer any kind of cinematic experience. I remember speaking to Rob Younger, the manager of the independent Parkway Cinema in Barnsley and he said that there is an employee in the screenings at all times to ensure that things such as projection issues are avoided, and people making noise on phones or talking is prohibited. It is this kind of customer care that makes a trip to an independent that much more enjoyable than a multiplex such as this. And I know I mentioned this already, but £9.60! It’s extortion.

Lets hope that other venues in London and nearby prove to provide a more pleasurable time than this cinema has.

18 January: 3/50 cinemas.

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[1] McNulty, Bernardette, ‘Old cinemas: it’s a kind of magic’, The Telegraph (22 September 2010)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/8009518/Old-cinemas-It-is-a-kind-of-magic.html

How multiplexes saved the British film industry

For those who have never heard of or seen Milton Keynes’ The Point, it was the first multiplex ever built in the United Kingdom. In November 2010 an article was written on The Guardian’s website about the cinema and how its development – inspired from a similar Americal model – helped to revive the British film industry.

Described in the article as a “strange structure topped with a red, neon-lined pyramid,” the design was supposed to be an image memorable in the public’s mind. Boasting ten screens, huge parking spaces and a vast array of snacks, The Point helped to boost film revenue in the UK and inspired the creation of multiplexes up and down the country. But it was not concerned about creating an exciting atmosphere upon entry to the building; the haptic experience of lavish buildings had been traded in, and the ‘experience’ of the cinema was dulled.

The increased choice of films, state-of-the-art technology, copious free parking space and a vast array of snacks on sale – all imported from the American model – made an immediate impact on the stagnant British market. The Point sold 2m tickets in its first two years, a miracle in a climate that had seen the national cinema attendance drop to just 55m by 1984 (the peak had been 1.6bn in 1946). Cannon opened the second British multiplex at Salford Quays in December 1986, and between 1987 and 1991 around 500 new screens sprung up nationwide, by which point British cinema admissions had risen to 100m.

The strange red section that can be seen here is just the foyer, the cinema itself is apparently just a ‘tin shed’ behind the unusual structure. The design is not there to create a sense of sensation or experience, but is simply an efficient method of getting people into the cinema. It replicates many other forms of contemporary leisure in its pastel-coloured, efficient yet uninspiring design.

While I have not been to this cinema myself, I hope to visit it later in the year.

To read the full article, go here.

Showroom Cinema, Sheffield

The steel city’s Showroom Cinema is located a short walk from Sheffield Rail Station and Sheffield Hallam University. The website boasts that it is one of the largest independent cinemas in Europe.

Festivals, Special Screenings & Events add to the rich cultural mix of the city and our Education activities engage learners of all ages. Showroom is also one of Sheffield’s most vibrant meeting places with a café/bar serving fresh food and refreshments daily as well as a free Wi-Fi service. We welcome you to join us.

They offer many different kinds of events to drawn in different clients; festivals,  young cinema, world cinema, cult Tuesdays, ‘Early Doors’ and of course, kids screenings (“Kino Bambino!”). Unfortunately for me, the Kino Bambino! screening this week was the specific screening that I went to, so I was treated to a performance of The Artist along with 12 excitable babies with their mothers (and one elderly couple more interested in cooing at the babies than watching the film). I suppose I’ve only myself to blame but I don’t think the website advertised clearly enough that the Monday 11am screening was always the screening for the proud parents with 12-month-or-younger children and that they were not expected to leave the cinema if their child started to cry or babble.

It worked out quite well, I suppose, that the film I went to be happened to be a silent one harking back to the 1920s era so there was no dialogue to miss over the crying of one-year-olds.

Anyway, I have never been to the Showroom before and I have to say, it is not quite what I expected. The image that I had of the cinema from word-of-mouth, looking at the website and also from the exterior of the building was that it was an old style independent cinema complete with a lovely foyer entrance, theatre-like red curtains and a certain kind of grandeur about it, but this is not what I found when I went inside.

It isn’t that there is anything especially wrong with the way it looks or is designed, it is just very “functional,” as Stuart Hanson might put it*. The walls are a bland shade of white, the entranceway is a long white corridor with a window on one side and absolutely nothing on the other, and the entire interior has been renovated from anything it may have once been. I was also surprised to find that there was more than one screen; in fact there are six! As many as many modern multiplexes in a city centre might have.

Inside the screen itself, I was also fairly disappointed. And I don’t mean because of the crying children during the opening credits of the film.

I really did not feel any sense of occasion inside the cinema. The screen we were put in – bearing in mind that this is the first day of release of the film, and the first showing of the day – was tiny. The screen was smaller than a projection that some of my friends set up when we were in university halls. The scummy walls had paint chipping off them and and the headache-inducing lighting blared incessantly along the walls.

I had arrived quite early and so asked an usher if I could perhaps look into one of the larger screens. I shouldn’t have been, but was, surprised to find that the larger screen was much of the same; the wall that the image was being projected onto had so much space wasted underneath and around that a screen almost 50 percent bigger could fit into the space that was there. The chairs were an unusual shade of yellow and there was no curtain covering the screen; there were black blinds either side of a 4:3 frame that would presumably slide open for the picture to play on.

Returning to my small screen, the film began to play (no adverts, which some people might prefer but I think this is quite an important part of the cinematic experience because it eases you into the entertainment and certainly gets me interested in upcoming releases).

I don’t know if it was turned down because of the special children’s screening I had stumbled into, but the sound was much quieter than I would have expected which either indicated a conscious effort to stop babies being frightened by the scary orchestra that plays behind a silent film, or some kind of issue with their sound system. God knows I wouldn’t want a child to have to suffer a beautiful piano and violin waltz at any kind of normally acceptable audible level.

In any case, there was certainly no spectacle made of the film at Sheffield’s Showroom. As much as it is good to organise so many different kind of special screenings as the staff of the Showroom do, what good is it if the actual film exhibition feels to be an underwhelming experience?

Of course it’s not all bad; the tickets were a very reasonable £4 for students. That’s the cheapest I can remember for years.

9 January: 2/50 cinemas.

*Stuart Hanson is a film lecturer at De Montfort University and has authored a very interesting book as well as many articles for journals on film exhibition in the United Kingdom. I conducted a lengthy interview with him for my dissertation which was extremely helpful and he gave me a lot of topics to think about to expand my research. He talked about how modern cinemas – in particular multiplexes – are ‘functional’ in the same way that a McDonalds is functional; it is there to serve a purpose and that is to show you a film and maybe get you to buy some popcorn along the way.

Brad Bird on the cinematic experience

I recently found this interesting article from Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol director Brad Bird who talks about a decline what he believes to be the cinematic experience and how he tried to recreate some of the magic that he feels cinemas used to have by using IMAX cameras.

IMAX cameras are gigantic in size in comparison to most industry standard film or digital cameras, but this is due to the huge size of recording image to allow for a greater quality of picture.

Bird explains that this improves the cinematic experience as it allows the audience to really immerse themselves in the film and become involved in a way that audiences have not done in recent years.

The default question with all the studios — and even more so a few years ago — is “Do we go in 3-D?” To me, 3-D is really interesting, and there’s been some good films. I’m as big a fan of “Avatar” as anybody, but what is not discussed often is the power of a really, really, really big screen. Part of the pitch of 3-D has always been “It’s more immersive.” And I agree that added depth perception is immersive, but you dim the image down and now I’m taking a step back. You put on glasses and now I’m taking another step back. The two things that movies have that you can’t get anywhere else are really big screens and an audience. … I feel like multiplexes and the shutting down of the grand old theaters have taken a lot of the showmanship out of presenting movies. There used to be a thing such as “first run.” The meaning of  “first run” is gone now because on opening day you can see a brand new movie on a good screen but it’s more likely you’ll see it on a crappy screen. And it can even be a small, crappy screen. It used to be that when a movie opened, if you wanted to see it early, you had to see it great. To me, the best example of showmanship now is IMAX. I pushed to shoot in IMAX, and Paramount went along with me, so we filmed a good chunk of this movie in IMAX, which is a pain in the butt. The cameras are big and they’re noisy. But the image quality – you can’t get that any other way … you really feel it when it’s in IMAX. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to do a whole film that way.

The idea that IMAX offers a reinvigorated kind of ‘showmanship’ is interesting and it is great that filmmakers recognise the importance of the cinematic experience for viewers. Because so many ticket sales have been lost in recent years due to the development of downloads and DVD sales, its good to develop and continue to use technology that would encourage the average viewer to see a film at the cinema. In actual fact, cinema sales declined by the 1980s due to general global economic situation of the time (there was a 96% decrease in sales between 1946 and 1984) and there has been an increase recently which could be due to the improving technology of 3D and digital screens.

To read the whole interview, check it out here.

Pictureville Cinema, Bradford

The first cinema that I have been to this year was the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford.

The cinema is actually located inside Bradford’s National Media Museum, which houses over 3 million items of national significance with regards to photography, cinematography, television and new media. It is a very interesting place and I would highly recommend that you go and visit if you get the chance. There are, in fact, three different cinemas in the Media Museum; as well as the Pictureville there is also one called the Cubby Broccoli cinema, as well as an IMAX which was actually the first IMAX opened in the United Kingdom.

Bradford proudly has stuck signs around the streets that declare it to the “City of Film”. On the Bradford City of Film website it proclaims:

“Renowned nationally and internationally, by 2020 this gem in England’s north will be synonymous with film, the definitive destination for anyone wanting to enjoy, learn about, make or visit because of film. Whatever your interest – from personal to professional, casual to academic – you’ll find what you’re looking for here. From absolute beginners to budding Bollywood stars, Bradford City of Film invites you to share our love affair with the big screen.”

All of this sounds very exciting, but it is a bit of a shame because a lot of the signs that I saw were directly outside the dilapidated and horribly disused New Victoria in Bradford’s city centre. It is a cinema that my grandparents used to go to when they were young, and it would have been a most interesting place to visit but has been in a state of disrepair for years. I researched this cinema as part of my dissertation and will give a full profile of it in a later post as it has had quite an interesting history.

Back on topic; the Pictureville, which opened in 1992, also boats that it has the only working Cinerama in the UK: while offhand I did not know what this was, anyone with Wikipedia abilities will be able to find out that a Cinerama projection screen, rather than being a continuous surface like most screens, is made of hundreds of individual vertical strips of standard perforated screen material, each about 7/8 inch wide, with each strip angled to face the audience, so as to prevent light scattered from one end of the deeply-curved screen from reflecting across the screen and washing out the image on the opposite end. Interesting, huh? In fact, the Pictureville is one of the best equipped cinemas in the UK; ready for projection of 35mm, 70mm, and 2K resolution as well as the Cinerama projection.

As you can imagine, the cinema – and museum – is quite the attraction for film-goes and so I am pleased to say that it is on my list.

The cinema itself provides a very comfortable experience; the seats are large and very plush, and the velvety curtain that covers the screen before the film starts may make some reminisce of the picture palaces and converted theatres that the very first films were exhibited in. It is a decent size; I would estimate around 200 people could fit in the auditorium at full capacity, but for this screening of The Iron Lady there was only a handful.

The staff were very helpful; an usher was stood by the door checking tickets and he was very polite and helpful when I asked if I could take a few photographs before the film started. The screen itself appeared to be on a small stage and I was told by my grandfather afterwards that it in fact had been a theatre before films were exhibited there, which really gave the place an authentically old feel. That being said, the projector (which transmitted this particular film on 35mm) is equipped to also show digital, and so the Pictureville has been moving along with the times.

To access the cinema one has to go through a part of the National Media Museum, which I think is a fantastic way to get you into the spirit to see a film. A small staircase takes you to the screening room itself, and the Cinerama that the museum boats about can be seen by the patrons through a glass window into the projection room.

Overall it was a very good experience and a great one to start off the year with. Also, the tickets were sold at £5.50 for student concessions (£7.50 for adults) which is cheaper that at some smaller independents. They even run a student night where the tickets are just £2.50 so I would encourage people in the area to go for that; I know I would if I was around here every Wednesday! Not only is that cheaper than you’ll be able to get Orange Wednesdays anywhere, but you are helping a local and beautiful independent cinema.

7 January: 1/50 cinemas.