In the 1930’s Glasgow was hailed as the ‘Cinema City’ - with over 110 cinemas at its peak, and a total seating capacity in excess of 175,000 - Glasgow had more cinemas per head than any other city in the world. To celebrate The Glasgow Film Festival from 12th-22nd February, The Magic Lantern are reclaiming Glasgow as ‘Cinema City’ with mini shorts programmes screening in some of Glasgow’s former cinemas featuring material from the Scottish Screen Archive & The Magic Lantern’s GFF programme.
The Cinema Windows project would not have been possible without the generous support of:
Eastern Exhibition and Display
Cameron Presentations
Scottish Screen Archive / NLS
Scottish Cinemas and Theatres Project
With thanks to:
British Heart Foundation
Post Office
Waterstones
CCA
The Control Master dir Run Wrake, UK, 2008, 7m
Fawn dir Christoph Rainer, UK, 2008, 9m
Uguns dir Laila Pakalnina, Latvia, 2007, 12m
Terminus dir Trevor Cawood, Canada, 2007, 8m
Govan Fair 1947
Nothing's Too Good For Your Children
A Day In The Life Of The Salon
Queuing For La Scala Cinema
Thanks to Scottish Screen Archive
The La Scala opened in October 1912, in a conversion of an existing warehouse. The auditorium seated 1,000, and also featured a restaurant, allowing patrons to take tea while they watched the film, and featured colourful, 3D jazzy decorations on the side walls, as well as the first Christie Organ in Scotland. The cinema was split to create two screens in 1976, and a third screen was added in the cafe area in 1978. By the time it closed in May 1984, it seated 650, 250 and 110. By this time, the large stained glass window above the entrance had been covered with a huge sign made up of shimmering yellow and gold circles spelling out the name SCALA. After lying empty for several years, it was converted into a Waterstones bookshop.
Please note that the films are screening downstairs in the cafe and not in the window as originally planned.
Click here for a map.
For more information on this cinema go to the Scottish Cinemas website.
The Rosevale is a rare surviving example of a peculiarly Scottish style of cinema building - the Back Court cinema. From the front, you’d never guess that an enormous auditorium, seating over 2,100, was hiding behind this tenement, blocking out a lot of the light for the flats around it!
The Rosevale opened in 1920, but was so popular it was expanded and improved in 1932. It lasted as a cinema until 1965, after which it was used as a bingo hall, snooker hall, supermarket, and now shop.
Above the suspended ceiling of the BHF shop, much of the balcony and ornate ceiling decoration of the cinema lies intact and forgotten, seats dusty but still in place.
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For more information on this cinema go to the Scottish Cinemas website.
A very early, short-lived cinema, the West End Electric opened as a cinema around June 1910, and had closed by 1914. Also known as the Vaudeville, it apparently had an L-shaped auditorium with a screen in the middle, with the cheaper seats viewing the image in reverse from the rear! The recently restored marvellous domed ceiling stylistically pre-dates the cinema, but may explain why such awkwardly shaped premises were chosen in the first place.
No known archive images exist unfortunately!
Click here for a map.
For more information on this cinema go to the Scottish Cinemas website.
The CCA itself re-opened on 25th October, 2001. Housed in a fantastic A-listed Alexander 'Greek' Thomson building, which reopened after a 3-year refurbishment, the CCA in Glasgow now has 5 performance 'spaces', one of which (CCA 4) is fully equipped as a 74 seat cinema. This was the first new single screen cinema to open in Glasgow since 1967.
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