Is it possible, after years of hunkering down at home with our screens and streams, that British audiences are learning to love cinema again? Ticket sales in 2024 were the highest since 2019, with a growing share coming from what was feared to be a waning tribe—the under-35s. Just this year, so many people petitioned to save the Prince Charles, a Leicester Square cinema whose fans include Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, that Westminster Council listed it as an “asset of community value”, buying it breathing space in its battle against greedy landlords.
Most heartening of all? Close-Up, Britain’s most fearless, most defiantly independent cinema, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Named after an Abbas Kiarostami film and located at the top of London’s Brick Lane, a patch where for much of the 1970s and 1980s, National Front supporters used to terrorise Bangladeshi residents, it was envisaged by its French-born founder, Damien Sanville, as a library and film archive, before, in 2015, moving around the corner to begin its new life as a 40-seater cinema.
Forty seats? There are Notting Hill investment bankers with basement theatres bigger than that. With Close-Up, though, small is beautiful. And ambitious: it’s one of the few cinemas in the capital—or anywhere in the country—set up to show 35mm films. Here you will find programming that is wild, international, across genres. In recent times alone: abstract animation from Hong Kong; Stanley Kubrick’s rarely shown 1955 crime thriller Killer’s Kiss; photographer Susan Meiselas discussing an anniversary screening of revered video essayist Marc Karlin’s examination of the Nicaraguan revolution; shorts by David Lynch and early documentaries by Peter Greenaway; a collection of 60-second films; the TV works of Ida Lupino; and German novelist Esther Kinsky introducing a film whose identity neither she nor the paying crowd will know in advance.
Close-Up hasn’t entirely jettisoned its original vision. Its walls are lined with nearly 25,000 DVDs, all of which can be borrowed by members. Here are sections devoted to North Macedonian cinema; to British directors such as Jane Arden, Donald Cammell and Thorold Dickinson; to titles that can’t be found on any streaming platforms. No university library can rival this collection. No public library, either. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they tried? There are also thousands of books. (On a recent visit, I was delighted to stumble upon Sähkömetsä: The History of Video Art and Experimental Cinema in Finland 1933-1998.) Especially unusual is its mediatheque, where researchers can watch films that, if they were formally released at all, came out in micro editions prone to digital rot.
Close-Up’s success teaches us that arts institutions would do well to create rather than cater to audiences
Close-Up isn’t a charity. It doesn’t get Arts Council funding. The east London into which it emerged, attracting artists and idealists from across the continent, has changed: private members’ clubs and gimmicky pop-ups are ten-a-penny. (After it vacated its original premises, a ghastly breakfast cereal café moved in.) It has survived through its own cosy café, modest subscription fees, rental hires and, most of all, the gratitude of its clientele, one of whom—Gwendolyn Leick, an Austrian-born Assyriologist who became a champion weightlifter after taking up the sport in her fifties—helped the cinema through a rough patch and secure a 99-year lease.
In recent years, Close-Up’s international standing has risen. It’s the nearest the UK has to that celebrated lighthouse of avant-garde cinema: New York’s Anthology Film Archives. (In 2022, it devoted a year-long season to Anthology’s founder, Jonas Mekas.) Like Cafe Oto, the experimental music venue in London’s Dalston, and The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, which has celebrated underground art since the early 1990s, its success teaches us that arts institutions would do well to create rather than cater to audiences, to trust the instincts and sometimes idiosyncratic passions of their programmers, to present challenging work in a friendly, let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom fashion.
Fifty prominent directors contributed short films to celebrate Close-Up’s anniversary. They portray it as a haven, warmth in a frigid city, a garden, a precious part of a broader cultural ecology. For Frances Scott, pensive in the wake of being barred from entering the United States, it represents “being near others, watching, of home and quiet stolen time”. For Nina Danino, it offers “cinema as a state of being and cinema as a giving space”. Words of solace, hope.
