I should have posted this back in November last when FAB Press' long awaited chronicle of the legendary Scala Cinema landed on my desk with a heavy thud. I've only skimmed thru the book so far - the sheer size and weight (over 10 lbs) requires an ergonomic space to enjoy it in, but I can tell from just a few casual passes, that this book is something very special indeed. Author Jane Giles charts a colorful 15 year history of the cinema beginning in 1978 when Palace Pictures co-founder Stephen Woolley launched the Scala film club with an aggressive repertory programme that shoved a finger in the face of an increasingly draconian Thatcher government. The Scala closed its doors in 1993 due to spiraling rent and a scarcity of funds for a long overdue redevelopment, but not before it turned generations of film fans onto the delights of flagship Scala films like
Eraserhead,
Pink Flamingos and
Thundercrack!, plus a steady monthly diet of American Exploitation, European Horror, transgressive Art Cinema and mind-boggling Experimental Film. The genius of the Scala in bringing these seemingly disparate strands of Cinema under one roof is reflected in the Scala's extraordinary monthly programmes, all 178 of them, which are lavishly reproduced in the book.
I've taken a few pictures of the book to give you a flavor of this epic production. I was lucky enough to order an early copy of the book which came in a hard slipcover adorned with beautiful Graham Humphreys artwork. In the final pic in the series, I've strategically placed my
Eraserhead DVD and
Thundercrack! Blu-Ray alongside the book just to give an idea of the scale. Step over to
FAB Press for more info....
I was scared to open my copy as I knew when I started reading it that it would be impossible to just put down again (or pick up in the first place, weight wise). As a London dweller, my initial reaction looking at the programmes was that I just didn't go enough when it was around. I went to a talk by Jane at the end of last year and she said that the Scala had a stack of its own films which they showed when there was a gap in the schedules. If you look at the frequency of screenings of some movies (including I think THUNDERCRACK! and TAXI ZUM KLO you can work out which titles they owned.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment David, very good to hear from someone who actually attended the Scala. I came of age just as the Scala was heading into decline, and regrettably it didn't figure in any of my trips to London while it was still open. For a few years, Cork had a pretty good film club known as the Kino and I was lucky to catch many memorable repertory screenings - Apocalypse Now, 2001, and I remember well the thrill of seeing a club-screening of Crash, while the Irish censor was dawdling over granting the film a general release certificate. The Kino is long since gone now, but the baton has been passed in some style to the Triskel Arts Centre. And yet, I almost never go to film screenings anymore. You often here talk of the communal experience of cinema-going, but I grew increasingly weary of packed picturehouses over the years, with their distractions and unruly behavior. Nowadays it's almost impossible to get through a film without the glow of an iphone/samsung life support machine in the rows ahead, or worse still, someone taking a call. It's a shame it's come to this because I really don't see any contemporary films these days, I'll usually catch up with something much later on Blu-Ray or if it falls into my lap courtesy of a TV screening.
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