FROM THE ARCHIVE

Madrid: City of Lost Cinemas

Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

The audiovisual essay starts with a historical account of the early days of movie theaters in Madrid and then moves on to trace a brief history of film exhibition in the Spanish capital to ultimately showcase a series of movie theaters that used to populate its cityscape. 

The essay is structured around two concepts: the detailed exploration of buildings and locations where movie theaters used to exist through a string of consecutive still images and the utilization of sound clips from a variety of films that were projected (or might have been projected) in these movie theaters. In terms of the image track, I often focus on details of buildings to later open the shot and identify the movie theater. Additionally, I utilize archival photographs to compare the then and now of these locations. I start with locations where the traces of previously existing cinemas are completely gone and I finish with recently closed exhibition spaces, where you can still appreciate what they were. 

The selection of sound excerpts offers a wide range of films, from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), from There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) to a classical Spanish film such as Viaje a ninguna parte (Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1986), from Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) to a cult film like Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980). There’s an intentional majority of Hollywood films: I believe that the cinematic imaginary of most Spanish moviegoers has been historically shaped through American film. I establish a set of associations between the theaters’ images and the sound excerpts that are, at times, symbolic and, at times, narrative, linking different films. I try to replicate a cinephile’s journey through the streets of Madrid, assaulted by an array of cinematic memories while walking by the buildings that shaped their film knowledge and experience. All the sound excerpts deal with the idea of loss and death, establishing a link with the main motif of the film: the disappearance of film exhibition spaces in Madrid.