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Truly Free Film

Some Rambling about Internet Culture, Placemaking, the Collective Narrative and the Future of Movie Theaters…

By Justen Harn

The Cinemapocalypse

For many there remains something magical about sitting in a cinema surrounded by strangers invested in a story, recalling tales told around a campfire, everyone drawn to the light like one of Brakhage’s moths. These tropes, in and of themselves, are indicative of film’s romantic, metaphysical appeal, but perhaps more importantly for our purposes, they bely the importance of the context within which moving images are consumed.

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Given the sanctity of this near­century­old film­going ritual, why is it that movie theaters are struggling now more than ever to attract an audience? Even in the absence of current technological trends,at present the typical home­viewing experience cannot come close to that of watching a film projected on a 50 foot screen in a movie theater. To paraphrase Ted Hope, the trouble is that large box theaters, and many small art house theaters, while able to offer an unparallelled experience, are entirely dependent upon mass market cinema releases, products developed based on predictability and maximizing returns.