Last week, the independent Filmhouse cinemas in Edinburgh and Aberdeen and the Edinburgh international film festival (EIFF) suddenly closed. One hundred and two staff, including myself, were notified and made redundant, effective immediately. This was my first year programming for the EIFF.
The closure was particularly painful as it came during the same week that critics breathlessly covered the glitzy, premiere-heavy BFI London film festival. It’s tough to watch one cinematic institution crumble as another is celebrated. Cinema matters, but only if it’s in London. Cinema is in great health, but only if you can get talent to pose on the red carpet. Ultimately, there is a deeper issue: cinemas are not considered cultural spaces.
The loss of the Filmhouse cinemas and EIFF comes during the “perfect storm” of Covid, the energy crisis and inflation. After more than a year of closures due to the pandemic, a survey reported that “59% of respondents cited cinema-going as their most missed out-of-home entertainment activity”. Yet cinema-going is also the most easily supplanted experience. The rise of streaming services has made at-home viewing easy, comfortable and cheaper, with viewing figures increasing 109% in a year and 3 million people joining one for the first time. Wanting to watch films has never been the issue.
When we think of cultural spaces, it’s arts centres, theatres, music venues and nightclubs that come to mind. Places where the public engage with and create culture, and around which scenes are formed. People don’t think about cinemas in the same way. Instead, the cinema as a cultural space has long been devalued, leaving only two options for filmgoers: a multiplex or a luxury experience.
The appeal of the multiplex is obvious enough; they’re cheap and feature big screens and superior audio. The boutique venues promise a luxury experience and offer perks such as footrests and food delivered to your seat. Independent cinemas that focus on film curation, community and audiences just don’t fit in this equation. They have become ghettoised under this moniker of “cultural cinema”, which implies there are proper, money-making venues, and then there are the other ones. Sparkly add-ons in the form of Q&As may be a sticking plaster on the problem, providing a little live element to screenings, but they don’t address the real issue at hand. The cinema itself as a cultural space should be enough.
Independent cinemas are spaces of creation, as well as consumption. They nurture filmmakers, film professionals and audiences alike, and have a ripple effect on culture. They allow people to meet and go on to create more of this art. I owe my own career in film to hours spent in my local multiplex, and then the Prince Charles cinema in London. I had never seen a Q&A before, never knew that a cinema could be so alive, that filmmakers were people within reach who loved movies too. I didn’t know you could put on all-night events, that audiences could howl at the screen, or that you could see a film forgotten by history.
The filmmaker Ben Sharrock tweeted that he “dreamt of making films for a living because of Filmhouse and EIFF”, and the film director Mark Cousins wrote, “We can make good films as long as we live close to a cinema that shows greatness.” The independent Filmhouse cinemas in Aberdeen and Edinburgh were not just repositories of new releases. They hosted festivals and events, programmed arthouse, repertory and populist films, and made room for captioned screenings, BSL-interpreted events and safe spaces for community-led screenings. All of that, gone. There should be room for curation and experimentation beyond profit. Every single screening, red carpet or not, is an experience.
Anna Bogutskaya is a film and TV critic, writer and broadcaster
