[Week 6] Movie Palaces!

The readings of this week are discussing about the development of multi reel film and the narrative quality of it. As I discuss in the last week's blog post. The growing up of the cinema system and the exploration of potential of the multi reel long film makes both the filmmaker and the audience curious about the narrative power of the media of cinema. In 1920s, with the historical background environment in Europe and America, some of the big questions that filmmakers bring to the audience on big screen are the discussion of woman rights and human rights in general. Actually, these are the topics we are still discussing about through the influential media of film these days.

Since we already discussed a lot in this week's zoom meeting about gender and race, what am I going to talk about in this week's reflection will focus on another interesting point I found on the reading. The Movie Palaces!


"Legitimate theatre, rather than variety theatre, became the dominant model for cinema, though, as we have seen, various traditions were merged in movie theatre programmes that includes elements of live performance and shorts films together with the feature" (193, L&P) 

In Part IV, Feature films and cinema programmes, When I read the paragraph where Grieveson and Kramer state that back to thee nickelodeons era, some of the audience choose to go to a specific theatre because they love the music quality, the film's orchestra accompany there(192). I think it is very intriguing that in the past music is such an important "live" element in film screening. If nowadays I can pay to see a Hans Zimmer's musical performance of Interstellar(2014) in LIVE while WATCHING THE WHOLE FILM, I am willing to pay 10 times more than the movie ticket to see that ngl.

Now I am just really sad about how much we miss in the developing of cinema structure. I did some search online try to see what it feels like watching a film with a full orchestra there and it looks really fun. This performance was given in the Clemens Center, a 2,600 seat 1925 movie palace (originally named Keeney's Theatre) in Elmira, NY on July 23, 2017.

Paragon Ragtime Orchestra - Movie Palace Finale!

I also found an old documentary about the actual movie palace in 1920s, I wish I can have the experience of watching movie in this type of set up, maybe NYC still has it somewhere. 

The Movie Palaces

The closest thing I see will be one of the theater performance in Lawrence last year in the Stansberry theatre that shows the Pippin. But I still want to know how it will feel like to see a flat screen with edited film and live music.

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