News that the art house Chauvel Cinema is set to close in a few weeks has alarmed many theatre and arts patrons across Sydney. It comes on the back of the Valhalla cinema in Glebe closing a few weeks ago. Council is the landlord of the Chauvel located in the historic Paddington Town Hall. When the news broke I quickly enquired of staff regarding a rent free period to help the cinema get back on its feet. To my relief the Council had already waived six months rent to assist the Australian Film Institute make ends meet during the feasibility study period (see below). Even with Council forgoing all rental income (which would be unusual unless a not for profit were involved) the study demonstrated a loss of $30,000. Council rental return is less than 20% of that figure. So what can Council do when emails and letters plead for our intervention (see letter below)? If the AFI does not want to continue managing the cinema how should Council approach the issue? If the AFI were to request an extension of the lease as a rent free subsidy on the bias of building a successful business model with community support and sponsorships, then I would support such a grant for at least 6 months. The question for cinema supporters is - can they make the Chauvel a viable art house cinema in the current declining cinema market?
The Sydney Morning Herald reported the dilemma on August 4Art-house cinema to close
By Garry MaddoxAugust 4, 2005
On the day the Valhalla in Glebe closed its doors, the Australian Film Institute confirmed it will shut another art-house cinema.
The Chauvel in Paddington, once famous for the slogan "if it's at cinemas everywhere, it's not on here", will go dark at the end of next month.
The institute will hand the cinema back to the building's owner, the City of Sydney, after a feasibility study found it would lose up to $30,000 a month without improvements of at least $250,000 to add more screens.
The institute's general manager, Geoffrey Williams, describes the closure as tragic.
"There's not going to be any screen culture cinemas in Sydney," he says.
The two-screen Chauvel has faced an uncertain future since its long-term managers, Alex Meskovic and Chris Kiely, handed it back to the institute in May. They blamed the trend to watching DVDs at home and the poor quality of art-house films for box-office halving in a year. Williams says the cinema lost more than $30,000 in June and July. A City of Sydney spokesman says talks are continuing about hiring the cinemas for special screenings.
A study on the entertainment industry has suggested box office will not grow in the next five years. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australian Entertainment and Media Outlook says admissions will fall 5.2 per cent this year and only slowly climb back to last year's 91 million in 2009.
"The cinema industry is really in transition," says the study's author, Matthew Liebmann. "Unless it finds some way to pull people back into the cinemas, we will see decline."
Here is a typical email letter asking for Council's support - Don't let Melbourne get the drop on us!
Dear Shane,
My family and I urgently call on you to intervene to prevent the Chauvel Cinema, in Paddington Town Hall, from closing at the end of September. We ask that you maintain the Chauvel as a centre for independent filmmaking in Sydney and New South Wales.
Great films cannot be produced in an environment where great films cannot be seen, as they were meant to be: on the big screen. If the Chauvel is allowed to close, NSW will lag disastrously behind world cinema culture. We will effectively cede to Melbourne - home of the new Centre for the Moving Image - the role of Australia's premier film culture centre.
Keeping the Chauvel operating is crucial to the cultural, social, and fiscal life of New South Wales. Without the Chauvel, the city and state would be left with no dedicated venue for independent Australian shorts and features, masterpieces of world cinema, great works from film history, and cutting edge digital features. We ask that you do everything in your power to make the Chauvel a vibrant publicly-funded centre for cinema culture in Sydney.
signed resident
P.S. We have already lost the Valhalla Cinema a few weeks ago. That hurt. The loss of the Chauvel, as the last venue for the screening of independent films would be nothing less than a cultural tragedy. Please do not let it happen.
11 comments:
Hi Shayne,
Many thanks for your reply to my email, and especially for your support of a continuation of the rent free period. In case you or your other consituents are not aware, there has been a weblog set up to coordinate community efforts to save the cinema, which can be found here. As there is currently very little information on the current situation publicly available, I hope you will continue to post anything you are able to here.
I would also be interested in your feedback as to the most effective action concerned people like myself can take. I am certainly not in a position where I can do anything besides lobbying the relevant bodies and publicising the matter, but it is hard to know which bodies are involved and what can be done to help.
Cheers,
Brad.
"Keeping the Chauvel operating is crucial to the cultural, social, and fiscal life of New South Wales" - hmmmm.
A crappy cinema showing a load of foreign (French films with threesomes) and Australian (pretentious artsy films about university students reconnecting with their childhoods in the 'burbs) tosh that can easily be watched at home on DVD. A cinema that loses money is hardly crucial to the fiscal life of NSW - which is losing enough money as it is.
The Chauvel and the Valhalla provided echo chambers for soi-disant highbrow technocrats to patronise Howard voters over nasty wine, and watch mediocre films, paid for by the hard, private sector (ie real) work by those same patronised Howard voters.
There is no added value in watching a French threesome (or Toni Collette in the suburbs) on a large screen over watching it at home, especially on a plasma screen. All cinemas are facing this issue.
Enough - as Smart said, the free market is pretty good at sorting out the wheat from the chaff.
They will not be missed.
Toby,
You demonstrate the sort of ignorance about what (and the value of what) is actually shown at the Chauvel (and Valhalla) that presumably keeps many people away. This is probably partly the fault of the cinema management itself, who don't go out of their way to publicise what's on. But I think there is a larger problem about the accessibility of difficult films for audiences who aren't familiar with them. This isn't to say that all of the films shown there are good. Many are patently not good, and are designed to be watched as exemplars of a particular kind of cinema in a particular historical context. If you don't have an interest in film history, you aren't going to get much out of these. Likewise for contemporary films, which are often shown because of the hype they received overseas, regardless of their actual merit (the French film Irreversible, for example, should never have been screened here, not because it should have been censored, but because it was aesthetically worthless). But on average the films shown at these cinemas are of very high quality, far higher than ordinary commercial cinemas. Maybe your perception has been skewed by seeing too many bad arthouse films; but maybe your perception itself needs adjusting -- maybe you haven't yet learned to read the sort of films you caricature in your post (it's ironic hearing you lampoon "soi-disant highbrow technocrats" in the same pretentious turn of phrase they, whoever they are, would presumably use). I think part of the responsibility here lies with the cinema itself. If people aren't attending or enjoying the films, why aren't they run in festivals with a component to help people understand the films -- talks, discussions and so on?
You display the same sort of short-sitedness with respect to your assessment of the financial merits of retaining the cinema. Just because the cinema itself may need to be subsidised does not mean that the fiscal contribution it generates to the state and wider is negligible. This sort of small-mindedness would see all sort of non-self-sustaining cultural institutions close down, neglecting all of the long-range impacts they have on our societies. Presumably most of the public art galleries in Sydney are not self-sustaining. Should they be shut too?
Brad.
Brad,
Your reply was actually quite offensive. Terms such as ignorance and "short-sitedness" (sic) are attacks ad hominem (to ignore the spelling error - it was supposed to be me who is "ignorant").
When making an ad hominem attack, it is always good to know the man you are playing. Those who know me would hesitate to call me ignorant or short-sighted.
Rather than even conceding I may have a point - you suggest I am a victim of false consciousness - and suggest I have not yet learned to read the films. I do know how to read these films, and call emperor's new clothes on them.
My point is that these films are not "difficult" - which is technocrat elite leftist code for bad art, and usually involving pornography. This is not some sort of paean for Soviet Socialist realist art, but there is a direct link between taxpayer subsidy (the AFFC) and the commercially unviable and boring Australian cinema that has been churned out over the last decade. These films deal with the interests of the Labor voting taxpayer funded elites of Carlton and Glebe, and consequently fail to generate much market share. For example, the recent hooha about censorship was more a leftist snit over censorship than really about the films (Roger Scruton's book Modern culture is a good one on this).
Not content with that, you then call for more taxpayers' money to be spent in festivals with talks by more elites lecturing the masses about how to understand the film. This is elitist (in the wrong sense), patronising, and if anything smacks of Soviet/Socialist art practices, that does. When has the real answer to waste of taxpayers'oney been more taxpayers' money?
The real point is that the very small audience that actually wants to see these films can do so at home - on DVDs they have bought from Amazon.
Whatever I think of the films, I am not forcing anybody to agree with my point of view. By demanding I pay more of my hard earned income to support these ventures, I am being coerced.
On that basis alone, there is no reason why taxpayer's money should be used to fund a loss making venture. If the venture loses money, it is very difficult to see how it can make much of a fiscal contribution. Losses are tax deductible, and the wages (and therefore income tax paid) are pretty low (or I am in the wrong job).
You draw too long a bow re art galleries - when/if all art can equally be viewed in homes, there may be a case to remove public subsidy of art galleries. The US, with much smaller taxpayer subsidisation, seems to have managed to have world beating galleries funded by private charity. Films do not need to be shown at a cinema for someone to get the same enjoyment out of them. Even conceding that a film like Sith might benefit more from a cinema is correct, I have never seen Sith at Chauvel.
So now where is Shayne Mallard's free western market approach gone?
if this cinema can't stand on its own two feet economicaly why are supporting it?
Hypocrisy knows no bounds when it comes to buying votes for the forthcoming Septemebr 2007 elections.
Jake
Where's your free market economic approach gone now?
Or is just you like these second class arty-farty movies.
Why don't you just suggest Council buy this property, as well as all the sex clubs in KX?
How dumb is that?
Council should not be in the development business.
Council already owns the property housing the Chauvel Cinema as I outlined in my blog. Also I have not proposed Council buy the sex club properties - even if they were for sale. My prosed 5 year urban revitalisation DCP will cost the ratepayers nothing. Shayne
James(is that your real name?), thanks for your virtual anonymous flaming of my blog site - not. let us know your one so we can enjoy your intellectual brilliance and courage for open debate.
All donations to my campaigns are disclosed per the laws of Australia and policies of Council. I sincerely thank those who support my campaigns because without them (and its the same for Greens or Clover Moore - dont duck that one) we could not get our message out in the campaign. SM
you should take that up with Tim Dick then. I have nver said we will aquire them. Check out my media release and Blog to verify. Lefties might try and spread this lie (even in the Wentowrth Courier) but dishonesty and misrepresentation is the last resort in a weak arguement. SM
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