Print Out: A City’s History, Told by its Cinemas

This article appeared in the November 15, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

This article first appeared in Portuguese in the inaugural issue of Vai e Vem, a print-only film magazine published by the new repertory theater, Cinema do Centro Cultural Unimed-BH Minas, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Film Comment has translated and published this piece as part of our series Print Out, which shares exclusive excerpts from journals, magazines, and other indie publications from around the world.

Cine Candelária in Raul Soares Square, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Photo by Janine Moraes. Courtesy of Vai e Vem.

Dark chambers, seats of different shapes, a projector. The physical sites that enabled impossible dramas, comedies, adventures, fictions, and romances to reach the public through cinema are also part of our memories. In Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais [a state in southeastern Brazil], there is an extensive list of these places: Progresso, Alvorada, México, Guarani, Regina, Roxy, and Nazaré are some of the names that are merged with the past of the city.

It is difficult to start a conversation about the 200 screening rooms that once existed in Belo Horizonte without evoking feelings of nostalgia: everyone who moved through the city before the 1990s has a movie-theater story to tell.¹ A romantic encounter, an unforgettable film, the performance of a major actor, the smell of popcorn, or the flavors of the treats sold by the confectioner are all part of the collective sensorial memory. And each of these memories is associated with an address. Even though the passing of time compromises the accuracy of people’s impressions, it is not rare to find stories like one from Leôncia Vieira, who had her first-ever movie-theater experience in Belo Horizonte several decades ago. She was still new to the city, having recently arrived from a small town, when she entered an old theater, Cine Candelária, in the Raul Soares Square, close to where she lived with her sister, to watch a musical. She was dazzled by the animals who sang a song—one that she remembers to this day, at the age of 66.

Other than the fact that she can’t remember the name of the film, the experience is present in her memories even now. “It was enchanting. The forms of entertainment in small towns were different. I fell in love with the beautiful chairs, the talking animals, the big screen—I asked myself how that film was made,” Leôncia tells us. “I just can’t recall if it had colors or if it was me who colored it.”

After moving permanently to Belo Horizonte, Leôncia started to accrue memories of other films and other cinemas, infused with the experience of the city. On her list are movie theaters like Cine Odeon, Cine Floresta, Cine Santa Efigênia, and Cine Theatro Brasil—cinemas that now share space with memories of walks through the streets, candy counters, and ushers, and still have the flavor of the Galeria do Ouvidor’s combination of sugarcane juice and pastel.²

“Going to the cinema was a whole outing in itself,” Leôncia recalls, and says she cannot establish the same relationship with movie theaters now located inside shopping malls: “It is not a space for us, it is a space for consumption. I rather like the street, the natural air. Back then you could just see the film poster on the street, go inside, and watch the movie. Nowadays, all the cinemas are up high, and you need to pass through all the floors of the mall to get into them. It doesn’t have the same joy.”

Shopping-mall cinemas are the majority today: in the city, 70 screening rooms are spread across commercial centers. Despite the generous number of spaces available for culture and entertainment to be enjoyed by the population of Belo Horizonte, the film options on offer are not that assorted: because most of the cinemas are franchises from the same company, the screening titles are usually the same and do not present much diversity to the public, which finds itself lacking alternatives to the blockbusters provided by large distributors.

The expansion of home entertainment, from VHS tapes to DVDs and Blu-Rays, is a process that is still on track today with streaming services. It is during this shift that street-facing movie theaters lost their space to mall cinemas, an environment much more prone to consumption rather than culture. “Street-facing cinemas had a sense of community,” says Daniel Werneck, an animation film and digital arts professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). “To watch a film was part of a sociability ritual, a shared experience. Today we have it as a shopping mall service, without a cultural focus.”

However, this was not always the reality: between the 1930s and 1980s, the majority of Belo Horizonte’s oldest neighborhoods had movie theaters to call their own. Thiago Souza investigates the city’s history in the Invisible City Project, and explains that these spaces were designed so that workers in the neighborhood did not need to travel downtown to have access to entertainment. “These places were built for the workers, and once they were occupied, people came to consume those movies,” he comments.Thiago believes that the modernization movements that culminated in the closure of these sites ended up erasing the past and causing great losses to the history of the city, its population, and the neighborhoods themselves, since the entire area surrounding the movie theaters was strengthened by the people’s habit of going to the cinemas.

Reminiscences of a City: There Was a Cinema Here

It is not only in the memories of the population that a cinema leaves its mark. Despite the demolition of many buildings that used to house screening rooms, some movie theaters have evolved apace with the changing city landscape. It is not always easy to identify them. The majority have gained new faces and new uses. Because these cinemas were usually built on large land lots—an average theater could accommodate an audience of around 800 spectators—the available space became sought-after in the real-estate market, especially for businesses that require large plots.

Most of Belo Horizonte’s street-facing cinemas share this common history: they became parking lots, churches, garages, banks, and retail stores. It is rare to find one of these buildings that still fulfills its original function, although many still have some of their main architectural features: a sloping floor, high ceilings, pillars to delimit circulation, the presence of a counter or mezzanine, and a large area where the projection booth once stood.

Because these theaters were built in different moments of the 20th century, their constructions are not unified by any specific architectural style, although the art deco theaters can be recognized by their geometric facades with straight lines. Many of these cinemas, however, were designed by some of the fundamental architects of the city, like Nicola Santolia, who was responsible for the architecture of Cine Candelária, and Raffaello Berti, the creator of iconic edifices such as the Belo Horizonte City Hall and the movie theaters Metrópole, México, Santa Tereza, and Floresta.

The importance of these sites to urban life is evident when we observe that, even more than 20 years after the closure of Cine Pathé, the bus stop on Cristóvão Colombo Avenue still bears its name and serves as a point of reference. Architect Artur Lacerda highlights that it is necessary to recognize the resilience of these spaces where cinemas once stood, as structures sometimes live longer than people. “It is required of us to understand their infrastructures and that spaces can accommodate various uses and be transformed without losing value,” he points out. Artur emphasizes the necessity of preserving these sites as a cultural heritage for the city and its people.

However, the architect does not believe that the original function of these places needs to be restored. Instead, they can be assigned new uses that attend to the needs of today’s public, like in the case of Cine Progresso, now a gym in the Padre Eustáquio neighborhood, and Cine Santa Efigênia, which was transformed into the Autêntica nightclub. “The path to conservation could be this one,” Artur claims. “A lot of people remain nostalgic, dreaming that all those spaces will be movie theaters again, but the market is not like that. We already have access to other cultural assets in the central areas [of the city]. We need to understand that preservation and conservation could mean other uses. The worst thing is for a building to be abandoned or to be used for activities that can damage its structure, as in the case of parking lots. The injury that cars inflict on a structure is far worse,” he contends.

The iconic Cine Pathé, in the Savassi area, is one of the movie theaters facing this end. For more than 50 years, the cinema exuded glamor in a property consisting of almost 11,000 square feet. Now it lives on as a massive parking garage. In her book Cine Pathé, the sociologist Celina Albano attempts to rescue the theater’s history by documenting others’ stories and her own experiences there, noting that the Pathé has gone through many different phases, with art cinema being just one of the most notable.

Celina remembers that going to the Pathé was one of the city’s great activities, and attending it was a kind of ritual. “Nobody went to the cinema wearing simply any type of clothes. It was a space for socializing and meeting people,” she says. She further remarks that the theater captivated the public by creating a platform for alternative films, and for the works of cult directors who were not exhibited in other cinemas. “It was very gratifying to like something so much and to have it at your disposal,” she says nostalgically.

Celina points out that it is hard to think about the center-south region of Belo Horizonte without remembering the Pathé and other establishments in its vicinity, like the pubs and bakeries that transformed the Savassi neighborhood into a commercial area. “To know the cinemas is to know the city,” she affirms. However, despite many attempts by public and private powers to reestablish the Pathé, the place is still a parking lot—a huge loss in her view. “If it was revitalized, the Savassi would have another attraction. Cinema boosts life in the city.”

This is a translated excerpt of a longer article that appears in print in Vai e Vem. The translation from Portuguese to English was done by Gustavo Maan for Film Comment.