Overview

The single-screen movie theatres that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighbourhoods from the 1920s are all but gone. In this volume, photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie houses and forlorn marques are an elegy to the disappearing icon. In the early 1980s, Putnam began photographing closed cinemas, cinemas that had been converted to other uses (a church, a swimming pool), cinemas on the verge of collapse, cinemas being demolished and even vacant lots where cinemas once stood. The result is an archive of images, large in quantity and geographically diverse, showing what has become of the Odeons, Strands and Arcadias that existed as velvet and marble outposts of Hollywood drama. Introduced by Robert Sklar, the photographs are accompanied by original reminiscences on moviegoing by Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris and Chester H. Liebs, as well as excerpts from the works of poet John Hollander and writers Larry McMurtry and John Updike. Sklar begins by mapping the rise and fall of the local movie-house, tracing the demise of small-town theatres to their role as bit-part players in the grand spectacle of Hollywood film distribution. While the images in the book can be read as a metaphor for the death of many downtowns in America, the book aims to go beyond mere nostalgia to tell the story of the disappearance of the single-screen theatre, illuminating the layers of cultural and economic significance that still surround it.

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9780801863295

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Reviews

<p>The boarded-up movie theaters in Michael Putnam's Silent Screens wear their faded glamour like battered hats. Putnam's photographs, taken with an 8 by 10 view camera, are starkly formalistic: the boxy, Art Deco theaters are largely shot head-on and centrally placed in the frame, making the viewer conscious of minute variations in detail and texture. The stylized neon marquees that read 'Ritz, ' 'Lux, ' or 'Judy' contrast with the blank peeling facades, as if we can see the dream palace that once was and the shell it has become.--Eric P. Nash New York Times Book Review

<p>Michael Putnam's strikingly beautiful photographs document American movie theaters and the passing of that era in American culture. They penetrate the barrier that traditionally separates significant aesthetic achievement and historical events. Such is the contribution, historically, of great documentary photography.--James L. Enyeart St. Louis Post-Dispatch

<p> The boarded-up movie theaters in Michael Putnam's Silent Screens wear their faded glamour like battered hats. Putnam's photographs, taken with an 8 by 10 view camera, are starkly formalistic: the boxy, Art Deco theaters are largely shot head-on and centrally placed in the frame, making the viewer conscious of minute variations in detail and texture. The stylized neon marquees that read 'Ritz, ' 'Lux, ' or 'Judy' contrast with the blank peeling facades, as if we can see the dream palace that once was and the shell it has become. -- Eric P. Nash, New York Times Book Review

<p>Disused small-town and neighborhood movie theaters are to photographer Putnam what the decrepit churches and storefronts of the rural South were to Walker Evans: objects that, austerely photographed in their decline, can cause us to reflect... As you study Putnam's well-composed and well-lit photographs of abandoned theaters, a pang for the lost past inevitably afflicts you. Even more saddening is his record of conversions--theaters turned into evangelical churches, bookshops, banks, restaurants, a swimming pool.--Richard Schickel Wilson Quarterly

Author Information

Michael Putnam is a freelance photographer. His photographs have appeared in such publications as U.S. Camera, Du, and America Illustrated. He also served as one of four photographers for A Guide to the National Road, also available from Johns Hopkins.

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