Gauteng used to have an array of fleapits, art-houses, bug-houses and independent cinemas. Andrew Worsdale remembers going to movies in the days before the multiplex and hails
the arrival of a completely independent movie-house in downtown Johannesburg.
The first movie I ever saw was “Swiss Family Robinson” at the Greenway cinema in Greenside and I vividly remember sleeping most of the way through it, waking up for an instant to see a giant python slithering down a tree, and then bursting into tears. Thirty-something years later I feel like crying because the Greenway doesn’t exist anymore.
Nor does the Lake Cinema in Parkview, where I used to bunk school to catch Marx Brothers movies or Ealing comedies. I remember seeing “Carry On Up the Khyber” at the Empire in Commissioner Street. I loved the movie but also the huge balustrade leading to the auditorium. It was knocked down and became the Kine Centre, where I saw the Christopher Reeve “Superman” as a teenager.
At age 8, I saw Dean Martin in “Airport” at the His Majesty’s and looked at the ceiling glittering with more stars than the movie. Around the next block at the Coliseum, I watched oodles of movies (they used to have an afternoon double-bill) and once again I was awestruck by its hacienda-like architecture. It too was knocked down.
The 20th Century Fox – where I saw “Carry on Doctor” – closed down in the late 1970s to become a shooting gallery. But my favourite cinematic sojourn was to the Gala Cinelux in Randburg, where I paid 50 cents – to sit in the upper seats, as opposed to 30 cents for the plebeians – in order to catch absurd movies like “Operation Kid Brother” with Neil Connery as 007’s brother, a hypnotist physician with magical powers used against a super villain out to rule the world.
My dad used to take me to The Pigalle, latterly named the Classic, on Jorissen Street in Braamfontein where I witnessed “Gone with the Wind” for the first time. I remember with nostalgic relish the golden velvet curtains that used to be raised for the whizzing opticals of the forthcoming attractions. That too was knocked down years ago to make way for offices.
Then there was the President, appropriately positioned on the street of the same name, which was an egte bio-caf, with seats and tables where one could munch on a burger while watching a cult classic like Larry Cohen’s “It’s Alive”, which has a baby being delivered only to munch up the gynaecologist’s hands. The Cine 303 opposite Library Gardens in the inner city was also a hangout for me in my movie geek teens.
I’d bunk school and catch the double-features along with the five or six hobos who decided to check in for the day, probably to sleep. Same with the Mini Cine One in Hillbrow – now a dedicated doss-house for the down-and-out that shows action movies in rotunda and hard-core porn on Sundays.
But those days are gone, and inner-city movie houses, as well as their suburban counterparts like the Cinerama in Orange Grove and Yeoville’s Piccadilly, have made way for the multiplex. Italo Bernicchi, who owned the Piccadilly in Yeoville, is the grand old man of Johannesburg’s independent cinemas. He also owned The Victory in Louis Botha for 30 years, The Piccadilly, The Corlett and The Avenue in Norwood which became The 7 Arts and then the Rex.
His voice rasps emotionally when he berates the movie-mall culture of “cappuccinos avec subtitles”: “These people say they want to see a movie, but they actually go window-shopping. They’re looking at ties and shirts and perfume displays. No one knows about directors or movies; they go there to be seen.”
Then there were the film festivals: the Johannesburg International Film Festival started in 1977, under the supervision of Len Davis and support form the Jewish Board of Deputies. It played at the beautiful Monte Carlo cinema in Jeppe Street (now a clothes shop) and the Lake cinema in Parkview (now a fleamarket).
“In those days there was no Rosebank Mall, no Cinema Nouveau … so the festivals were a great success,” says Davis. He recalls the release of Peter Weir’s breakthrough Australian art movie “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, for which he owned the South African rights: “I released it through Ster-Kinekor at what was then the Kine Centre, when Commissioner Street was the Sandton City of today … It played for four months and Ster-Kinekor were terribly surprised.”
The festival ran successfully into the mid-1980s. Then everything started bursting at the seams. Local film festival programming changed, notably with the fledgling Weekly Mail Film Festival and the Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg festivals presenting an alternative to the usual Euro-house compilation. The new festivals extended their programming to disadvantaged areas, with development and outreach programmes.
They invited renowned film-makers from around the globe to share their ideas and hold workshops. Over the years the Weekly Mail – later Mail & Guardian – Festival hosted Paul Schrader, Mira Nair and Clair Denis, while Cape Town invited the likes of Nicholas Roeg and Werner Herzog. In addition, they made strong efforts to screen local films, getting special permission for one-off showings of movies banned under restrictive apartheid-era legislation. They also included a healthy selection of short and experimental films. These festivals presented themselves as more than just shopping for imported spectacles; they were imaginatively and interactively programmed.
But things change: administrative and funding problems brought the Mail & Guardian and Cape Town Festivals to a grinding halt. For its brief existence Sithengi had a film festival alongside its market – but the programming was just too massive and indiscriminate – there seemed to be no focus. So we’re left with the Durban and Grahamstown film festivals as the sole source of imaginative programming of movies you’re not likely to see on the local circuit, and the obligatory festivals hosted by foreign embassies that hardly ever show their country’s cream of the crop.
And as for inner city or even suburban independent cinemas in Johannesburg, until June this year the situation was dire for movie buffs apart from DVD shops like Video Spot in Craighall and DVD Gurus in Melville, both of whom have a fairly healthy stock of hard-to-find flicks.
The Good Hope Cinema in Commissioner Street for many years was downtown Joburg’s oldest cinema – originally called the Uno. It was the magistrate’s court for Johannesburg’s Chinese community before it opened as a cinema playing silent movies to a larny white clientele.
It closed down about 10 years ago but its sister cinema Good Hope 2, which was formed out of the old Metro Market Street, is still running strong. Today it’s a predominantly black audience who frequent the range of action movies on show. This past week you could have caught double features of second-run movies “Date Night”, “Eclipse”, “Men Staring at Goats” and “Our Family Wedding” at R10 a ticket!
But on 8 June 2010 this year the situation changed with the opening of an innovative independent cinema located in downtown Johannesburg, on the east side of the city.
The concept has been in development since 2008, when Darryl Els wrote an extensive research document on the necessity of having an art-house cinema in Johannesburg for his post-graduate degree in Arts Management and Film Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He teamed up with Russell Grant and together with cultural development Arts on Main a partnership was born and finally the city has a cool, funky retro art house again – and appropriately enough it’s called the Bioscope.
The aim of the cinema is to increase the diversity of content on South African movie screens. In bringing new films to new audiences, the Bioscope is striving to grow new markets for new films, and so far have had enormous success in developing local audiences for locally and internationally produced cinema.
In a recent article, Mail & Guardian art critic Anthea Buys wrote: “The entire project – its ingenuity, its followers, its hand-me-down fittings, its defiance of urban logic – is a microcosm of how Johannesburg works.
And, indeed, the fate of the Bioscope is bound up with the fate of the part of the city it occupies. Grant and Els are positive about their prospects. ‘The time is just so right,’ Grant says. ‘There is excitement around this precinct, around Main Street Life and around Johannesburg.
Now is the time to do it. ‘We’re telling the rest of Joburg, The city is not what you think it is. We have this new independent cinema. This is big and it’s got great implications for the city,’ says Els.”
Arts on Main is an artist’s residency and oasis of everything arts related, with shops, restaurants, and galleries, all located within the Maboneng Precinct. From the beginning, its developer Jonathan Liebmann envisioned a cinema in Arts on Main.
The Bioscope has now found its home in Maboneng’s latest development Main Street Life, a transformed 1970s industrial building that’s set to become a mixed-use complex offering residential studios, retail shops, a rooftop events venue and a boutique hotel. Both Main Street Life and Arts on Main are located on Fox Street, and are within a two-minutes walking distance of each other.
After the sell-out success of the Encounters Documentary Film Festival, the Bioscope is hosting a seven-day film fest in September hosted by Women of the Sun, in conjunction with the Goethe Institute, the Gauteng Film Commission, and the Department of Arts and Culture, to celebrate African women filmmakers. It will be the first film festival of its kind to take place in South Africa, featuring 25 films by 23 talented women filmmakers from 15 African countries, with 15 of the filmmakers present at the screenings.
Also showing through September will be “Tales from a Golden Age” from Romanian director Christian Mungiu, who won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2007 with the masterful “4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days”.
“Tales form the Golden Age” is an omnibus film, with Mungiu scripting all the individual stories and directing one segment himself, allowing the other four to be shot by different novice Romanian filmmakers. What connects the various parts is that they all draw on urban legends from the Ceausescu era, exploring with absurdist humour how ordinary citizens survived this totalitarian regime.
There’s no way you’ll catch that movie anywhere else. With strategic partnerships lined up with the Labia in Cape Town (the country’s most defiant and well respected indie cinema), Contemporary Films in the UK, the Goethe Institute, Fireworx Media and Germany’s Brotfabrik Cinema as well as other distributors, producers, directors and organisations, the Bioscope is offering up a load of diverse cinema for diverse audiences. The thrill of being in the dark for the love of movies is back in Jozi, with a vengeance.
For more info and screening information visit their super-friendly website – www.thebioscope.co.za – and join them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.