Staff Photographer
Finding the real cultural treasures of Cape Town has become all too difficult in recent years. Rampant development has altered the face of the metropole and historic properties disappear overnight to make way for anonymous new edifices. It can be an alienating experience to live in a city that devours its past at such a rate.
This year, however, just down the road from the stately Mount Nelson hotel and partially obscured behind billboards advertising the latest concept in inner-city living, a venerated Cape Town institution celebrates reaching the grand old age of 60.
The Labia Theatre in Orange Street was opened by the Princess Labia as a performance space in 1949, having been a ballroom for the first part of its life. It initially served as a theatre, owned by the odd consortium of the SABC and the Department of Sea Fisheries, and hosting well-known South African playwrights until 1974 when its fortunes changed and audiences started to dwindle.
Around the same time, a film distributor named Tony Velks hired the premises for a week and staged a one-off film festival to capitalise on a large collection of avant-garde European and American prints he had obtained and was unable to find a market for anywhere else.
Directed by critic Trevor Steele Taylor, the festival was such a success it was decided to continue a programme of regular screenings and the Labia metamorphosed into a dedicated cinema. Since then it has stood its ground against developers, suburban emigration, mall culture and the curse of home video, scourges that sent most, if not all, of its contemporaries to an early grave.
In those early years the cinema was run by Wolf Miknowski, later by partners Mario Veo and Ingrid Burnett, serving up a rich diet of international art films and the occasional vintage print to a dedicated band of leather-jacketed cineasts, culture vultures and general Gardens lurkers.
Steele Taylor and a loose gang of associates devised the weekly film schedules, which remained a closely guarded secret until the day of print. You could expect to find anything from Fassbinder to the Marx Brothers being offered on the elaborate hand-printed programmes. In addition to the evening shows, a popular Saturday morning matinée was screened for children.
But by the mid-1980s the video age had arrived and film prints, especially older ones, were harder to come by. The lack of a regular supply channel meant that fortune played a large role in what appeared on screen, whereas poor print condition and an aging sound system frequently provoked howls of protest from the auditorium.
In 1989 Ludi Kraus, a film buff who had managed his own family’s cinema in Namibia, offered to buy the theatre and after a protracted negotiation eventually secured it. By this stage the building had fallen into disrepair and extensive renovation was needed. “Rats lived behind the screen and dust coated everything. The sound system was hanging by a thread, but I think, ultimately, I fell in love with the neon sign,” says Kraus, pointing to the authentic Seventies neon tubing that adorns the front façade of the building.
His casual approach belies the passionate work he has lavished on the theatre during his tenure there. In the past 20 years, Kraus has added three screens and a sister branch in Kloof Street catering to more populist tastes, but the grand old cinema in Orange Street remains essentially the same, with the same elaborate Art Deco foyer area and ticket booth that served audiences 60 years ago.
My own history with the Labia began in 1981. From the first time that I could see high enough over the sweets counter, the Labia has been a constant, growing magnificently older as I grew up in it. I would walk to the Saturday morning matinée, aged eight, clutching my sister’s hand. Later on, and with a dash more confidence, I would hold my first girlfriends’ hands in the back row as popcorn flew and rowdy kids drowned out the animated short. My father would take me to screenings of Scorcese’s The Last Waltz or anything with Phillipe Noiret in it.
When I graduated to the evening shows (admittedly at first to take advantage of the spicier Euro offerings that would occasionally be screened with a suitably extreme age restriction), the cinema took on a different role, a comfortable substitute for home. Whether it was to catch a one-off screening of a Visconti classic, an offbeat Solondz deconstruction, a local documentary festival or just to escape a hot night in the city bowl under the air conditioning, there was always a seat in row E, a warm welcome and a reason to come back again the following week. The theatre and its intimate grandeur began to inform the experience of watching the films.
As much as the building itself, the staff is largely responsible for the profound affinity many patrons feel towards the Labia. Not one has worked there for less than 10 years, some staying for more than 30.
Christine Andrews has been working there in various roles since 1978 and has become one of the indispensable pillars of the establishment. She knows every regular, as they in turn all know her. She has clipped my tickets, sold me popcorn, dispensed romantic advice, commiserated with me on breakups and has been known to point out empty seats next to single women who might offer an alternative, although I have never followed through on that one.
The rest of my family is also well known to her, as I’m sure are many other families like mine among the Labia’s frequent patrons. She remains an essential part of the reason I keep finding myself back at the Labia. Having sat through 30 years of the world’s greatest, weirdest and most profound films, her favourite tellingly remains Cinema Paradiso, Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s ode to the local cinema of his youth.
Similarly, Riedwaan Fridie has been the projectionist since 1984, screening everything from the Saturday morning cartoons to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Over the years he has seen friends at other independent cinemas lose their jobs as audiences dwindled and opted for the mall cineÂplexes, but the Labia has carved out its own space on the cultural map of Cape Town. “The only thing I don’t do anymore is the pre-screening for the censor board,” he says.
In the old days of the Film and Publications Control Board, the Labia frequently trod a fine line between what was and what was not “acceptable”. The police arrived several times over the years, once famously carting Steele Taylor away to jail during a screening of Alain Resnais’s film about the Spanish communist revolution, The War Is Over.
Part of the reason for the Labia’s extraordinary longevity has been its location. Being flanked by the University of Cape Town drama and fine arts faculties and within walking distance of three different city bowl suburbs provides a residual stream of bohemians and suburbanites alike, but the real key lies in the deeply personal relationships it has forged with its patrons over years and many thousands of metres of film.
We have reached a point where the cinema is no longer accessible except through a maze of other distractions in the form of shops, chain restaurants and promotional opportunities and, once there, to be faced with the limited choice between blockbusters or whatever the distributors deem sensitive enough for the “Nouveau” circuit. Machines dispense tickets and bored staff serve overpriced confectionery.
The Labia Theatre is the last cinema of its kind in South Africa, independent, free-standing and with a human heart at its core. A treasure worth celebrating.