Cinema
One of the first records of presentations of movies was at Druids Hall in Redruth. In 1904, the Imperial Radioscope Company visited the hall with their animated pictures. In 1910 Druids Hall was converted into the Jenkin's Picturedrome and operated by Mr William Henry Jenkin. Excited audiences filled the hall and marvelled as moving images of Pearl White, Rudolph Valentino and later Charlie Chaplin flickered across the screen. The cinema had its own orchestra, which started in 1918. Parts of the building (which was converted to a bingo hall in 1954, and burnt down in 1984) still stand today in Penryn Street, and the interior of the ruins now house St Rumon's Gardens. A rival cinema, officially called the Electric Picture Palace but known locally as The Egg Pit (so called because the owner supplied eggs for the London market) set up in nearby Foundry Row in the late 1900s. This cinema closed in the late 1920s.
In nearby Camborne, Mr Burrow, a local photographer put on the very first public Bioscope show, with a nightly open air presentation in the Market Square in 1909.
In 1910, the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth started showing films in the Arts Centre. Films are still shown at this site, as Falmouth does not currently have a stand-alone cinema of its own.
Currently, Cornwall has cinemas in the following towns: Falmouth, Penzance, St Ives, Helston, Redruth (see image), Truro, Wadebridge, Padstow, and just outside Bude. The cinema in St Austell was closed and demolished in 2007, as part of the town's re-development. A new cinema has now opened there. This means that important places like Newquay, Saltash and Liskeard currently have no cinemas. All of these places have previously had at least one cinema, and all have had several unsuccessful attempts to rebuild cinemas in these towns in recent years. None of the cinemas in Cornwall are owned by the big chains (like Vue). With the exception of the Rebel cinema near Bude, they are either operated by Merlin Cinemas or WTW cinemas, both local business concerns. Even the village of Delabole once had a cinema.
Read more about this topic: Media In Cornwall
Famous quotes containing the word cinema:
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)