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By Abe BeameOct. 23, 2024, 12:28 pm UTC • 23 min

Movies<br>The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies<br>As theaters throughout the country adjust to an ever-changing landscape, many are turning to cinema’s past. Could repertory and revival screenings be a way forward?

MoviesThe Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies<br>As theaters throughout the country adjust to an ever-changing landscape, many are turning to cinema’s past. Could repertory and revival screenings be a way forward?

Getty Images/Ringer illustration<br>By Abe BeameOct. 23, 2024, 12:28 pm UTC • 23 min

In late January, I visited Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to watch an infamous, practically unstreamable film. The Lincoln is the hub of old-guard, uptown prestige and culture and the headquarters of the New York Film Festival. On Saturday night at 8:45, prime time for pregaming before a night out, it’s maybe the last place you’d expect to see 20-something socialites. Yet the line outside the Walter Reade Theater on West 65th was full of them, braving the late-winter cold and a light rain for a sold-out screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 49-year-old Italian snuff film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a modernized adaptation of Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century novel. The film is a critique of fascism that at one point features graphic depictions of young, beautiful captives eating bowls of their own shit. There is very little in the way of arc or character development, and—spoiler alert for anyone who had other plans that Saturday night—the film ends abruptly following the sadistic, gleeful slaughter of the prisoners.<br>It’s far from blockbuster fare. But this crowd was not one I would’ve recognized from 10 years earlier, when I hit sparsely attended weeknight showings of Antonioni or Imamura or Godard with mostly older moviegoers who drank coffee or dozed off. The Lincoln Center crowd was full of nerds like me, for sure—bespectacled, wearing beanies or keffiyehs and holding dog-eared paperbacks on their laps—but most of the Salò audience looked like they had taken the train down a few stops from Columbia. They sat in large, diverse groups and sipped on cans of wine or beer, huddling and talking excitedly with mouths full of popcorn before the lights went down, after which they were rapt through the entire film. It was surprising and completely absurd.

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It was the culmination of a change I’d noticed developing over the past decade. The types and number of repertory films being shown are changing, as are the types of people attending them. Since the pandemic, I’d heard the oft-repeated narrative that fewer movies are being released in theaters, movie theaters are dying out at an unprecedented clip, and these are harbingers of streaming ultimately killing the moviegoing experience. But it didn’t feel that way that night at the Lincoln Center. It felt like I was a part of something—a culture or a phenomenon. Both a random event and a surprisingly coherent evolutionary step in a burgeoning movement. I wondered whether this was just my anecdotal experience in New York or a larger shift that could portend a future for moviegoing across the country.

There’s a word for these screenings of old movies: repertory. At a base level, it’s defined as a place where things can be “found or discovered.” The term is often associated with the stage; at a repertory theater, a resident company regularly puts on a staple rotation of old plays. But in the cinema, it essentially means revival—which often takes the shape of showing old movies in movie theaters, a practice that is almost as old as cinema itself. It comes in many forms. Those Wednesday screenings of Godard. A showing of Heat with Michael Mann, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro on hand for a Q&A. A Stop Making Sense dance party at an IMAX theater. An outdoor Summer Screen presentation of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in Tompkins Square Park. All of that—and more—is repertory.<br>The challenge that has always faced repertory cinema is access—the perception that if people have an easier, more convenient way to see a film, they will take it. Going to the movies is a hassle and an expense, no matter where you live. If your goal is to take in a piece of content, why subject yourself to that schlep when you could simply watch it at your own pace, in peace, at home? From virtually its inception, repertory has faced existential threats from a series of at-home viewing options: television, cable, VCRs and DVD players, today’s digital streaming apps. But each time, repertory cinema has proved its resilience, its demand, and its financial viability in spite of these inventions. Its...