Beauty and decay: inside America’s derelict movie theatres

There’s something divine about decay. Traces of what once was; eras of very different social concerns, tastes and aspirations. 

Movies can give us a window into the past, and as French photography duo Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre are proving, so too can movie theatres, particularly those partially chewed up by time. 

They can still be found in many American towns; majestic shrines to film, constructed during the golden age of the entertainment. But these cinemas now stand in various states of decades-long abandonment, empty, derelict, or reborn as something else entirely. Movie Theaters, published by Prestel, is an ode to these iconic American structures, or what remains of them. 

This book isn’t the duo’s first taste of tatters. They began their collaboration in 2002 by exploring Parisian remains and have published books including The Ruins of Detroit and Gunkanjima. 

The early 20th-century brought with it an entertainment boom. Hundreds of theatres popped up across the US, with many major movie studios commissioning architects to build extravagant, palatial auditoriums to satisfy the swelling appetites of spectators. 

Since 2005, photographic duo Marchand and Meffre have travelled across America to visit these theatrical relics. In hundreds of lushly coloured images, they have captured the rich architectural diversity of the theatres’ exteriors and interiors, from neo-Renaissance to neo-Gothic, Art Nouveau to Bauhaus, neo-Byzantine to Jugendstil.

Armed with a large-format camera, they composed images spanning landscape exteriors to intimate close-ups. There’s beauty in the flaking paint, opulence in the rows of tattered crushed-velvet seats, stories retained in the defunct equipment and abandoned concession stands. Laughs, tears, screams and gasps live on in the crumbling cornices. 

Some sites have not been left entirely for dead. But as the 1960s matured, so too did domestic TV sets and multiplexes. During the following decades, the heyday of the movie theatre was tarnished by modernisation. These majestic buildings, in turn, began taking on less majestic roles: bingo halls, basketball courts, bus depots, warehouses, fitness centres, flea markets, car parks and retail stores. 

In contemporary times, where streaming services reign and convenience outshines occasion, Marchand and Meffre’s book is not just an appetising visual record of the majestic movie palace, it’s a timely eulogy for a entertainment’s golden years. Decay, in its divinity, is evidence that things have moved on, for better or worse.

INFORMATION

Movie Theaters, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, £60, published by Prestel on 4 November 2021., prestelpublishing.penguinrandomhouse.de

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