Rebecca Alvin’s article addresses some important points for the art house/microcinema scene; the references to the transformations of the purposes of art house cinemas is familiar to me. In Charlotte, where I live outside of school, our art house theaters show only limited release studio productions and/or Oscar nod films with, as it was put, “limited box-office appeal.” I’m not old enough to remember days in which these theaters would have played more local and/or abstract (“sourceless”) cinema, but by now the theater is like a sub-cinema of big-budget studio releases.
On the other hand, the technology-influenced transformations of the art house scene seem mixed to me; while innovations such as the VHS probably did have a noted impact on the attendance and style of the old art house cinemas, the Internet further down the road can be seen as having changed the scene again in a different way; aberrant filmmaking can nest on YouTube/Vimeo channels and reach a wider, albeit mostly anonymous, audience.
But the fact remains that these art house theaters that were, are, and will be are changed indefinitely by the tides of society. The adventurous spirit and sense of community are no longer the way they were in many small-screen box offices, and that’s an important change to note, at the least. Such flashbacks can renew ideas for the current implementation of independent films and teach us about what such a gathering has to offer.
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