Since at the least the nineteen-fifties, when tv possession started spreading quickly throughout the developed world, film theaters have been laboring underneath one type of existential menace or one other. But regardless of their obvious vulnerability to a wide range of disruptive developments — residence video, streaming, COVID-19 — many, if not most, of them have discovered methods to soldier on. In some instances this owes to the dedication of small teams of supporters, and even to the efforts of people like Shuji Tamura, who operates the century-old Motomiya Film Theater in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture single-handedly.
You’ll be able to see Tamura in motion in My Theater, the five-minute documentary quick above. “The Japanese director Kazuya Ashizawa’s charming observational portrait captures Tamura as he screens previous motion pictures for an viewers of scholars and cinephiles, and offers behind-the-scenes excursions of the cinema,” says Aeon. These excursions embrace an up-close have a look at the totally analog movie projector of whose operation Tamura, 81 years previous on the time of filming, has retained all of the know-how. Although he formally closed the theater within the nineteen-sixties, it appears he retains his threading abilities sharp by holding screenings for tour teams younger and previous.
Although lighthearted, a portrait like this might hardly keep away from an elegiac undertone. Already affected by the depopulation that has bothered many areas of Japan, Fukushima was additionally badly bothered by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and their related nuclear catastrophe. In 2020, the 12 months after Ashizawa shot My Theater, a hurricane “triggered the Abukumagawa river and its tributaries to flood,” because the Asahi Shimbun‘s Shoko Rikimaru writes. “The Motomiya metropolis middle was inundated, seven individuals died, and greater than 2,000 homes and buildings had been broken.” Each Tamura’s theater and his residence had been flooded, and “half of the 400 movie cans on cabinets on the primary ground of his home had been drenched in muddy water.”
In response, assist got here from close to and much. “A producer in Kanagawa Prefecture despatched 10 bins of movie cans to the theater, whereas a movie show in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, delivered a film-editing machine. About 30 individuals affiliated with the movie business in Tokyo confirmed up on the theater to assist clear and dry the movie. The trouble led to the restoration of about 100 movies.” Alas, Tamura’s deliberate re-opening occasion occurred to coincide with the unfold of the coronavirus throughout Japan, leading to its indefinite postponement. However now that Japan has re-opened for worldwide tourism, maybe the Motomiya Film Theater can turn out to be a vacation spot for not simply home guests however international ones as effectively. Having been charmed by My Theater, who wouldn’t wish to make the journey?
through Aeon
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities, the e-book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
