Blog Is rep cinema culture in Toronto dead?

Last week, a press release went out announcing the re-opening of the Bloor Cinema. If you’re out of the loop (or new in town), the century-old cinema shuttered on June 30 of last year. On July 5 it was announced that the cinema was purchased by the Hot Docs Festival and Toronto-based film company Blue Ice, which intended to use the space as a yearlong HQ for the annual international documentary festival, and which has spent the last eight months giving the theatre a makeover. It’s now due to re-open in mid-March, under the decidedly less snazzy name Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

In an effort to retain ties to the Bloor’s tradition as, primarily, a rep house—a place that screened double bills by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Woody Allen, and Paul Verhoeven—the Bloor Hot Docs brass also announced the “Back To The Bloor” showcase. “On select Sunday afternoons,” the new Bloor cinema will “showcase classic fiction films that helped define the Bloor cinema in its popular rep years,” with films like Life Of Brian, The Big Lebowski, and Labyrinth. The selections seem more than a little pandering, equating certified “cult” films with rep programming. Given the Bloor’s longstanding status as Toronto’s definitive repertory house, the announcement makes us wonder: Is rep cinema culture in Toronto dead?

That prognosis may seem a bit premature. It seems like every few months a new indie rep house pops up—the Toronto Underground Cinema, the Projection Booth, etc.—and there is a general attitude that Toronto is a city that has a thriving film “scene.” But really?

The bulk of the cinemas we may consider indie rep houses—The Royal, The Revue, The Fox—rarely show legit rep programming. With the exception of a few monthly special events, The Revue and Fox show second-run features. And ditto The Royal, though its second- and third-run programming is supplemented by a smattering of first-run indie and foreign-language features and its monthly midnight screening of The Room. The Projection Booth, which shows up to five films a day some days, similarly relies on third (and fourth?) run features—it feels like they’ve been screening Le Havre for months—and independent films held by the cinema’s co-owner Jonathan Hlibka, CEO of local film distribution and marketing outfit Studio Film Group.

It’s out of necessity that these cinemas operate as multi-function spaces, rather than strictly revival or rep houses dedicated to, for lack of a better term, “old movies.” Except, wait, here’s a better term: “the history of cinema.”

Before TV, home video, Netflix, BitTorrent, etc., films—especially old films—were transient artifacts to be sought out. You might take a train three hours to a university to see a restored print of The Seven Samurai, or bus into the downtown core to queue up with the other stoners and insomniacs waiting to catch their umpteenth midnight screening of Eraserhead. Cinephilia—the often obscure, always effusive love for films and the cinemaaah—was an activity in that it was active.

The explosion of availability has naturally dulled this. It’s like that thing in The Simpsons when Homer procrastinates about seeing Mr. T at the mall: “I’ll go a little later, I’ll go a little later.” And when he finally got around to going, Mr. T had already left. Except now you can download Mr. T to your hard drive in Blu-Ray quality and stream him via your cloud to your 47-inch LCD screen. (Well, you can’t literally download Mr. T—not yet, anyway—but you get the idea.) So why take a train into a neighbouring city, or a streetcar across town, to catch The Seven Samurai when you can watch it at home in your underwear while eating delivery poutine and half-napping?

This brings us to the two spaces that perhaps best exemplify Toronto’s existent film culture. First, there’s the Toronto Underground Cinema, which specializes in “event-cinema,” where screenings will be augmented by some conceptual tie-in or extra-cinematic component. This can be anything from a live shadowcast performing in front of Rocky Horror Picture Show or a local film critic exploring the historical and artist contexts of an original film and its inevitable remake (which just so happens to be a plug of our own Re-Make/Re-Model monthly series).

The Underground is big on the whole idea of filmgoing being about the “experience” of the cinema itself—big screen, dark room, freshly buttered popcorn, the whole ball of wax. The accoutrements of watching a film are as important as the film itself. Maybe even more so. Here, cinephilia is not a solitary vigil, a pow-wow between film and film-lover, but a communal experience of playing along with well-worn classics. Stuff like Life Of Brian, The Big Lebowski, and Labyrinth.  The impulses here, for all their talk of getting-together, are ultimately wistful and melancholic. Living on the edge of the End of Cinema, the idea is not to explore film’s history and high watermarks, but to re-live its familiar comforts, a shared experience of whistling past the grave.

Then there’s the big, shiny elephant in the room, the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The Lightbox tends to get a bad rap from people who are suspicious of its sleek, corporate upholstery, of its cumbersome brand name, and the fact that there’s a condo perched on top of it. More relevantly, there’s the criticism that the Lightbox tends to poach on the wistful, nostalgic programming that keeps places like the Underground afloat. As much as the Lightbox prides itself on its eclectic programming purview, stuff like its Back To The ’80s program seems downright predatory. And while we love their ongoing Nicolas Cage retrospective (if only because it gives us an excuse to write 1,000-plus words on Nicolas Cage every week), a “midnight series” that kicks off at 10 p.m. seems to speak to a certain fogeyishness that pervades many of the building’s attempts to capture audiences outside of its better-heeled crowd of card carrying patrons of the arts.

TIFF does the arthouse stuff well, though. Granted, they have the resources (financially, culturally, industry-wise) to secure newly struck prints of all of Robert Bresson’s films, which may give them an edge of legitimately indie rep houses that may seem “unfair.” But what they prove, beyond all this, is that there is a market for this kind of cinema in Toronto. Against the explosion of accessibility, and the ever-expanding catalogue of Netflix Canada titles, there are still plenty of people who will put on shoes and pony up $12 to cross town to see classic, subtitled, foreign, offbeat films. Take, also, lecture series at the Revue and Miles Nadal JCC, hosted by critics and scholars like Adam Nayman or Kevin Courrier. People in Toronto will pay just to hear someone talk about film, to put films in context and grapple with the rolling narrative of an art form.

If the forthcoming Bloor Blue Ice Hot Documentarium or whatever it’s called truly wants to get “Back to the Bloor,” to recapture the fading essence of repertory and revival programming, they’d do well to take heed of this substantial portion of Toronto filmgoers.

Remember when the Bloor showed the restored print of Hausu and watching it felt like being a part of something outside of collectively retreading through our own sepia-toned snapshots of the cinema? Not everything has to be some hallowed Bresson marathon. But there was a time when “rep programming” and “cinephilia” meant more than sliding on your rose coloured lenses and rewatching a Muppet movie at 3 p.m. on a Sunday, and when Toronto’s pride in the vibrancy of its cinema culture seemed like something more than a lot of empty boasting.