When do cinemas serve communities, and when do they serve capital? How far is the cinema maker an agent, unwitting or otherwise, of gentrification? Programmer and film researcher Lennart Soberon strolls amongst the ghosts and zombies of Ghent’s historic cinematic spaces in search of a cinema without walls.

We’re looking for space. Or rather, one space in particular. Levi has been stationed as a neighborhood worker at the city’s docking district for some years. After hearing about my project, he agreed to give me a tour. He tells me stories of the neighborhood’s working-class past and present. This was one of the first areas of the city to house ‘guest workers’ from Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, and beyond. It once served as the nerve center of the city’s wealth, a city within a city. He recounts the neighborhood’s decline in the 1960s when port traffic was relocated, leaving the area to crumble. Despite this, the neighborhood’s shipping identity remains—the streets are still named after shipping destinations and goods once transported there. Levi skips ahead to more pressing matters. Gentrification is now taking hold. A few years ago, an investor bought an old shipping warehouse and remodeled it into office spaces. To make sure the ICT company employees on their vaping breaks wouldn’t be disturbed by locals, a large metal fence was installed, standing as a material and symbolic divide between the old and the new. The people living in the neighborhood have become outsiders in spaces they’ve known for so long. Finally, he stops outside a large brownstone building and shows me what we’ve been searching for: the old neighborhood cinema. 

Or at least, what’s left of it. The cinema closed in the 1980s—courtesy of television and the multiplex—and the building was repurposed as a sports center. Where the box office once stood, a series of posters advertising boxing matches now hang. One of the contestants stares back with steely eyes, as if warning me to stay out. I can’t blame him; after all, my visit is somewhat dubious. As part of a cultural film project, we’re attempting to revive old neighborhood cinemas at the edges of the city,  in what are known as  ‘gateway neighborhoods.’ These spaces are on the literal outskirts of town, demographically diverse and home to many diaspora communities. They are still perceived as the working-class heart of the city, yet remain culturally neglected. Investment doesn’t trickle down here as it does in the center, or it takes predatory forms. This neglect has left cultural institutions to falter in the last few decades, with many spaces located in these areas closing throughout the 1980s and 1990s. 

With our series of “phantom cinemas,” we hope to bring these cinema spaces back from the dead and restore them to their former glory, at least for a few  evenings. Each event is envisioned as a wake for the space that once was, including archival footage of the neighborhood and oral history accounts. Yet since cinema and the arts are not a priority in the area, Levi is also skeptical of our plans. He’s worried that it will only attract people from the city center, turning the space into a little more than an exotic backdrop. “If something runs here, it should be run by and for the community, “ Levi says. “It shouldn’t be a wake, but an exorcism of what’s been haunting the neighborhood.”

Silent Streets

Tourists often swoon at the medieval architecture of my city, munching on waffles while remarking how “alive” the history is. Boat rides, walking tours, and augmented reality art experience await those looking to interact with the city’s distant past. After a day of strolling, tourists can find refuge in the numerous nameless, soulless stores that have mysteriously multiplied in recent years—blink and you’ll miss how the poke bowl restaurant is now a bubble tea cafe. When passing by these spaces, it’s hard to imagine they were once a bakery, newsstand, neighborhood café, concert hall or cinema. Those places where we used to shoplift or receive our first kisses. One cathedral near my high school was left to rot for years. There were rumors of ghosts, but I never believed it. Yet when a supermarket chain announced it would move in, I started to have my doubts. Is something haunting the city? 

Sometimes the past cuts through, shining in the sun like the bicycles pulled from the bottom of our river. Before I was born, my city was a very different place. Pictures of my parents reveal a smog-ridden industrial city. Textile factories polluted the water and unleashed a strong stench which filled the streets. Housing conditions were abysmal; the cul-de-sac city planning ideal for daylight robberies. When the city shed its skin in the 1970s and embraced a new wind, it was partially thanks to a cinema. A manic Dutchman had bought old theater seats and decided to open the city’s first art-house film theater. Around the same time, a new generation of left-leaning artists, lawyers, and academics became involved in counter-cultural politics. They used the cinema as their base, spending formative years shaping the city and planning citizen initiatives. Later, they would start the country’s first annual film festival, smuggling prints across the border and letting the films of Nagisa Ōshima, Lina Wertmüller & Sergei Parajanov enter a town still entrenched in catholic conservatism. Ultimately, the city establishment shut down the cinema’s owner by accusing the owner of screening ‘pornographic content.’ Subsequently, the festival was stolen from him by a business associate who amputated its political legacy and transformed it into Belgium’s most subsidized film festival. This story still looms over any local screening movies, an allegory of cinema’s duality as both a political disruptor and commercial cash cow.  

Today, the landscape looks quite different. My town is often dubbed a “cinema city,” and rightly so. Boasting two art-houses cinemas, a legion of festivals, and a handful of cultural initiatives, city goers in Ghent are well catered to. With our film collective Kinoautomat, we’ve been organizing film events for the last seven years. When infrastructure is available, we screen in cinemas. When not, we build our own makeshift movie theaters in apartments, parks, or amidst the rubble of a mid-renovated monastery. 

We’re not the only ones. Ghent is home to over 20 nomadic film collectives, each carving out their own little corner of film history. Whether focusing on horror (Kuru Collective), psychoanalysis (FilmAtelier), queer resistance (F*Q Film), or combining film and culinary experiences (Ciné Mangiare), they’ve all left their mark in building a passionate cinema ecosystem. However, cultural austerity and political gatekeeping are changing the scene. Many initiatives rely on the goodwill of larger cultural institutions for space and work with little to no funding. Meanwhile, big organizations have been growing, while smaller ones are struggling to survive. Last month, demolition began on the university’s oldest film theater. As part of a sell-and-lease-back scheme, the university decided to tear down nearly 30 years of local history to address budget constraints. When the space changes shape, I wonder if the new tenants will be aware of the building’s history. Will something between the walls continue to flicker? Perhaps the ghost of Grace Kelly still haunts the hallways in search of a screen to inhabit. 

Phantom Pains

This destruction of spaces and the memories tied to them is especially apparent in the city’s outskirts. Over 40 cinemas once existed within city limits—each catering to their own neighborhood and audience. Such a number is staggering for a provincial town of its size, but almost all these spaces have now vanished. Burdened by the advent of television, the multiplex, and rising property prices, they fell one by one. After that, city planners only had to finish the job the free market had started. Where there were once four film theaters, now stands the city’s biggest shopping mall. Others became clothing stores, supermarkets, parking lots, and apartment buildings. Those with an architectural eye can still spot the remnants of art-deco movie palaces amongst the dried foods and discount carpets. One local musician even converted an old cinema into his private home, the iron balconies now looking over his living room. Across from another cinema that is now a Carrefour supermarket stands a bankrupted bar. Its dirty windows are covered with the graffiti message: “Everything is about money” (Alles draait om geld). A literal writing on the wall of what happened to the neighborhood and is yet to come. 

While looking for the keys to the cinema, Levi recalls how the older inhabitants have fond memories of the place. To them the cinema was something like the town square, where you’d always bump into someone and get the latest news. Looking at the local city history reveals how cinemas were neighborhood-focused, in tune with the needs and demographics of their surroundings. From transcultural screening spaces to socialist worker cinemas, they often prioritized connection over content. As a programmer and avid moviegoer born and raised here, I often find myself wondering how cinema can serve a city. With the city continuously changing and rent prices peaking, I fear it may collapse under the weight of these phantom pains. In gentrified neighborhoods, tenants already live a strange type of half-life—physically present but knowing they may soon be forced to leave. Their presence becomes caught in limbo. The underfunded environments they occupy paint an equally bleak picture. On the outskirts of town, the skeletons of cinemas are dusted off, reminders of neighborhoods deemed unworthy of further investment. When film culture is reintroduced, its role is often ambiguous. After all, cinema can also serve as a tool of gentrification, drawing audiences from the city center to the periphery, upsetting the neighborhood’s balance. 

Over the years, we’ve been approached many times to start pop-up cinemas in ‘pre-developed’ areas of the city. These lots were often old industrial areas that awaited repurposing. Yet the Faustian bargain was clear–the offer of a screening space was really just an invitation to warm up these areas for future investors. Once construction began, and cinema had played its part in the ritual of gentrification, it ceased to exist, leaving only upper-class residential units behind. Similarly, the re-opening of cinemas and other cultural spaces has become a lucrative practice. Yet, without the support of and connection with local communities, such resurrections are simply a form of taxidermy, resulting in empty reanimations of past selves.. These spaces then become the living dead, zombies which wander aimlessly, consuming the very communities they promise to serve. If cinema-makers are to exorcize such exploitative elements, they need to hold themselves accountable for the spaces they occupy. In short, a cinema not for cinema’s sake, but for the purpose of people. Levi decides to let me in and show me what’s left of the cinema’s architecture. The projection room is still there, as is the old bar furniture, but not much else. After walking through a narrow hallway, we enter a small courtyard where the biggest room used to be, capable of housing over 400 people. Levi warns me that we’ll only be able to do screenings in the summer since one of the cinema’s walls has collapsed. “Will that be a problem?” he asks. After all, the entire neighborhood can peer inside. On the contrary, a cinema without walls is just what we’ve been looking for.

Lennart Soberon is a programmer and film researcher based in Ghent, Belgium. He is part of the cinephile collective Kinoautomat and organizes film cultural events in KASKcinema and beyond. His latest project attempts to revive old cinemas in the city’s gateway neighborhoods in order to start a conversation on the right to the city and how space should be distributed.