Almost a century ago Belfast had a booming cinema scene. Now its rich cinematic history has been confined to memory and to the city hall.
“Belfast has had a love affair with cinema ever since cinema first arrived here in 1896,” film critic Brian Henry Martin says.
“But the golden age of cinema was the 1930s when cinema boomed in this city.
“Cinema offered a unique experience for people during a really dark time, because it was the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“A lot of working class people were living in quite hard and difficult conditions -overcrowding, squalidness – and to come to a picture palace on their doorstep, a cinema which offered them an escape, offered them excitement, joy, tears, that is what thrived people in.
“And these places were palaces.”
Picture palaces soon popped up all over the city.
“Each of the great picture palaces in Belfast, whether it be the Ritz or the Troxy or the Curzon, they all had these kind of exotic names.
“They all had unique individual characters and they all showed very different films,” says Brian.
“They were showing one film each.
“Some showed comedy, some showed cowboy movies, some showed the romantic weepies.
“They also represented the area and the community that they were in.
“So the Strand very much represented this area in east Belfast, very much like the Stadium on the Shankill Road represented the people of the Shankill or on the Falls Road it was the Broadway.”
But with every decade, the picture changed.
“The biggest impact on cinema going in Belfast came with the arrival of television,” says Brian.
“So cinemas went from 40 plus down to 20.
“Then with the impact of the Troubles in 1969 it was no longer safe to go out at night and the city centre closed down and sadly some of the cinemas were targeted and they were firebombed and destroyed.”
Now only one of the original cinemas remains – The Strand in east Belfast.
“The Strand is an ocean liner of a cinema – it is a ship of dreams, it has survived almost by default,” Brian says.
The cinema has been under threat of closure, was firebombed and at one stage was going to be a supermarket.
“It was going to be all these things and yet it survived.
“That really is a testament to the spirit of this place, that people here saw something special and it must be preserved and treasured.”
formerly Mad Cornish Projectionist.