Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

The movie theatre is a site of transaction, intersection, and convergence. Economically, it is the point of transaction, where the film product is consumed by the collective audience. Physically, it stages the screen and houses the viewers of the projected moving image, spatially hosting the site of urban entertainment where representation and interpretation intersect. Conceptually, the geographical contents of films converge with the everyday lived spatial experiences of the moviegoing individuals. Given these characteristics, the movie theatre carries rich potentials to disentangle some of the intricate relationships between the urban and cinematic experiences through anchoring to concrete site locations. It is therefore somewhat surprising that movie theatres, as commented by Giuliana Bruno, remains ‘one of the most disregarded topics in cinema studies yet a significant generative agent of cinema’. By looking at three particular moments when the architectural forms of movie theatres were transformed in tandem with evolving practices of cinema production and the changing urban experiences in Hong Kong, this paper attempts to establish how the movie theatre can become a lens through which the urban experience can be deciphered through the artistic and popular production and consumption of films. Specifically, the cases presented in this paper also point to how urban and cinematic experiences are shaped through the transnational flows of people, popular culture, and capital especially in Asia. It is hoped that this discussion can contribute to deeper understandings on what the future of cinema entails.