The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies
October 25, 2024 at 01:57AMChances are your neighborhood movie theater shows only first-run movies. In these days of franchise fatigue, that likely doesn’t do much to pull you away from your widescreen TV streaming recent releases in 4K. But more and more, theaters are making room for repertory screenings—not just black-and-white classics, but films just a couple of decades old—and people are flocking. For The Ringer, Abe Beame investigates the unlikely rise of revival cinema.
The definition of what repertory is and what it can be has undergone a transformation in the 21st century. This change has driven young, diverse programmers to create slates that have zagged away from traditional repertory’s ivory-tower, esoteric ([cough] white, male-driven) canon, motivated by local markets’ tastes. Few capture this current, populist, modernist spirit like Cristina Cacioppo, the former creative manager at Alamo Drafthouse NYC and the current director of programming for Nitehawk. Cacioppo’s light bulb moment—when she realized her audience’s taste was shifting—came with two screenings of Fear, the 1996 James Foley movie starring Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon. “I had shown it at [New York culture and community center] 92NY, probably in 2010, and it was just a smattering of people,” Cacioppo recalls. “And then when I showed it at Alamo, probably in 2017, I believe it sold out a 92-seat theater. I think of films like wine; they have to sit and wait for their moment. I try to keep engaging with movies and not pretend the only good ones are from before 1990.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/24/the-future-of-film-may-just-be-old-movies/
via IFTTT
Watch