Ciné-Forum: A Luminous Moment in the History of Canadian Underground Exhibition: The Blinding Light!! Cinema in Vancouver

Abstract

The history of film exhibition is incomplete without close attention to the variety of irregular locales and their programming that audiences have had the opportunity to frequent. The word has been used to delineate practices outside the mainstream, whether in relation to films, filmmakers or cinemas. In the 1950s, Manny Farber employed the word to refer to seedy New York that catered to working class men attracted to muscular action films, whereas Jonas Mekas in the 1960s used the word to refer to a group of experimental filmmakers remaking film culture. In actual fact, Farber came to use the term in both senses. Contrast his classic 1957 essay Underground Films in which he extols the virtues of Howard Hawks and pre-Sfagecoac/t John Ford, with his 1969 essay, Canadian Underground, in which he champions Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), noting ironically that it depicted a room similar to the basement room in Toronto in which it was exhibited.1 Whether catering to an underclass or to a group of filmmakers and spectators bored and irritated with normal cinema consumption, underground exhibition plays an important role in society; indeed, one might argue that it is a sign of a city's cultural well-being that unconventional films and film events can be experienced on a regular basis. To use one's disposable income on low budget filmmaking in a low-rent and often subterranean space is akin to bypassing large corporations to support a cottage industry. Call it low capitalist decision-making, if not exactly resistance.The exhibition environment for films can be as ephemeral as the films themselves. In recalling a bygone era of filmgoing, we are resurrecting not just empirical facts but a moving image history, a conscious way of seeing, that is mediated by the chosen location and programming of the exhibitor. The Blinding Light!! Cinema in Vancouver ran films six nights a week from August 1998 to August 2003. This microcinema with 103 seats (although up to 150 people could be squeezed in) became a centre for screening rare and orphan works, and served as a catalyst for new works to be created. This case study allows us to consider what may have been lost to public memory and to the city's cultural offerings in the age of film viewing sites such as YouTUbe and Vimeo.2 1 am hopeful that this account might spark interest in similar small screening spaces and microcinemas across the country as objects of study.3If you were in Vancouver in the late 1990s in search of a movie fix, and chose to give the two porn theatres (now closed) a miss, your choices of theatres were the Alcan Omnimax theatre inside Science World, Capitol 6 (now closed), CN IMAX Theatre in Canada Place, Denman Place Discount Cinema (now closed), Dunbar Theatre, Fifth Avenue Cinemas, Granville 7 (now closed), The Hollywood Theatre (now closed), Oakridge Centre (now closed), Pacific Cinematheque, Paradise Theatre (now closed), Van East Cinema (now closed), The Park Theatre, The Ridge Theatre (now closed) Tinseltown cinemas, Vancouver Centre (now closed), and The Varsity Theatre (now closed). This meant that one would have had a choice among thirty-five to forty screens, although some overlapping films would have reduced one's mainstream options. In addition, a brief line or two in the weekly Georgia Straight under Repertory cinemas would alert you to the offerings of The Blinding Light!! Cinema.The history of this microcinema is linked inextricably with its founder Alex Mackenzie, who moved from Montreal to Vancouver in 1990 and soon became involved with the Cineworks Film Co-op, the Latin-American film distributor Idera, and the Pacific Cinematheque. Mackenzie started to make short experimental films of his own while immersing himself in the film culture Vancouver offered. Inspired by the now defunct Pike Street cinema in Seattle that, for Mackenzie, memorably screened a series of old Church of Latter Day Saints propaganda films, he rented a storefront at the north end of Commercial Drive in East Vancouver. …