Art House Rules
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Yet aside from the demise of the Fine Arts, the “art film” segment of the business seems to be bucking the trend. For the past two weeks the giant Imax Theatre at Navy Pier has been screening Ang Lee’s art-house hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This spring the Gene Siskel Film Center will open its new two-screen venue at State and Randolph. Los Angeles-based Landmark Theatres has opened two art-house multiplexes in the area: Renaissance Place in Highland Park and Landmark’s Century Centre at Clark and Diversey. And the newest player in town, Century Theatres, recently unveiled an 18-screen multiplex in Evanston, with a third of its screens–the “CineArts 6”–devoted to art-house titles. “We just felt that independent and art films deserved the same respect and theatrical opportunities as regular first-run movies,” says Nancy Klasky, vice president of marketing for the west-coast chain. “I respect very much what Landmark and the Music Box are doing, but we feel we have built a movie theater that surpasses them in the experience, especially in the presentation side.”
But art-house multiplexes like Century’s and Landmark’s show how nebulous the term “art house” has become. In the 1960s and ’70s an art house was a theater that screened films by international directors like Bergman, Truffaut, and Fassbinder. But with the rise of the Sundance Film Festival and specialized distributors like Miramax, Fine Line, and October (all of them divisions of major studios), art-house exhibition now accommodates such mainstream titles as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. Independent, foreign-language films, distributed by smaller companies like Cowboy Booking International, Winstar Cinema, Strand Releasing, and New Yorker Films, remain the province of the Music Box, Facets Multimedia Center, and the Film Center.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
