mardi 30 janvier 2007

A cabaret-like cinema

© Brice 2007


“May I help you?” the ticket seller asks me with a broad smile. He was hidden behind some sort of sentry box when I walked into the Brady. Then, he rushed outside his box to greet me. Indeed, customers are not that frequent in here. That must be why the man looks so pleasant. No match with cashiers at, say, the MK2 or the Pathé: “A ticket for Mala Noche please.” Mala Noche is the first film by Gus Van Sant. It dates back to 1985. A perfect match for the Brady I think. An old black and white movie in an old movie theater. I’ll stay in the hall before the movie begins. The ticket seller returns to his wooden box... and then disappears... where is he going? A few minutes later, he reappears with a grin. “I’m on my own here, I’m overburdened with work.” Actually, the man is both cashier and projectionnist. He just went to quickly check the machines. I’d better let him do his job. Some other film buffs are queuing in the hall. The Brady couldn’t run without him, he’s the odd-job man of the place.
The Brady is an atypical independent movie-theater. It struggles to keep float, though the competition in Paris is ruthless. Paris is the world capital of the seventh art: there are some 368 cinemas in town. Among them, the Brady is just one little place with no real financial help. Being independent, it doesn’t screen ads before movies begin. Independent movie-theaters thus bank on conviviality and a familylike atmosphere. Yet, the tendency is that these cinemas are slowly but surely shutting up shop, while multiplexes manage to have more and more screens available. The Brady still resists this tendency: In the old days, it was a music hall. It became a movie theater in June 1956, and quickly turned into a place for connoisseurs, as it only proposed... scary movies! The Brady thus built itself a reputation of a horror cinema, before Jean-Pierre Mocky saved it from scratch. A famous French film director, Jean-Pierre Mocky bought the cinema in 1994. The Brady, also called L’Albatros since then, now offers a wider range of genres, but it has also become a temple for Mocky’s fans: every film he directed is screened there, hence the posters on every wall. Mocky enven indulged into screening Robin des Mers, which he directed, but which he didn’t manage to sell to other cinemas. The Brady was thus the only cinema to offer it to moviegoers! For thirteen years now, Mocky has been pumping his personal money into the project. The good point for me is that the Brady does not only play movies directed by Mocky. If it did, it would probably have even less success.
This is how it works, and I’m convinced there should be more independent places like that in Paris. The problem is, these independent cinemas cannot compete with huge machines like Gaumont, UGC or Pathé. The Brady’s atmosphere is that of an old cabaret, and at the same time, it is as if spectators experienced a timeshift. Mala Noche was ok, and as I left the hall, buried in my thoughts about Paris cinemas and stuff, the ticket seller ran out of his sentry box and came to me. He was smiling. “So, he asked, how was the movie?” We chatted for a few minutes about Mala Noche, but especially about the place, about his work. He really loves his job; he confided in me that he thought he was proud to be a keystone of the survival of the Brady. Alas, we soon had to drop the conversation, again customers were queuing and he had to get back to work, with a smile.
© Brice 2007

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