A week night in downtown Johannesburg can be desolate. With its dark, disused workshops and derelict petrol stations, the city’s periphery has the air of an abandoned film set.
But in one scuffed urban block, somewhere between Doornfontein and Troyeville, the lights are on. The smell of hot popcorn lingers in the street. There is a scurry of clinking beer bottles and coins as crowds of Jo’burg hipsters rush to get tickets for tonight’s screening at The Bioscope, a new independent cinema in the Maboneng district.
Maboneng, which means “city of light”, is the fond nickname for a liminal square of earth on Main Street, where The Bioscope and the chic residential block Main Street Life nestle, propped up against the popular Arts on Main complex. The Bioscope occupies a ground-floor space in the Main Street Life building and is a micro-cinema in the vein of the South African “bioscopes” of old.
These were small, independent cinemas frequented in the 1970s and 1980s, before film culture was co-opted by major distribution chains that established cineplexes in shopping malls.
After moving the project around Johannesburg in various forms for three years The Bioscope’s founders, Russell Grant and Darryl Els, settled on the street-front shop in Main Street Life for its permanent home.
Grant and Els began looking into the possibility of establishing an independent cinema during their final year of drama study at Wits University. Now a reality, The Bioscope bridges a gaping rift between commercial venues, which dominate movie culture in South Africa, and underground film clubs guarded by pundits.
Grant and Els’s Bioscope is far more accessible than other alternative film clubs, and hardly in competition with the dominant chains, Ster Kinekor and NuMetro.
In the two weeks following its opening on June 8, The Bioscope has screened a dizzying range of old and new releases, including a selection of foreign football documentaries, French novelist Phillippe Claudel’s I Have Loved You so Long (2008) and Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host (2006), a monster flick set in Seoul, South Korea.
On my first visit to the cinema, during its opening week, I watched Adi Loveland’s documentary Unhinged: Surviving Johannesburg, a roughshod guide to loving the city, potholes and all. My heart warmed at stories of familiar sorts of people navigating familiar chaos, and at the comfortable leather seats, relics salvaged from an old church. Soon to join the vintage chairs is a 35mm film projector, a donation from the Goethe-Institut.
The entire project — its ingenuity, its followers, its hand-me-down fittings, its defiance of urban logic — is a microcosm of how Johannesburg works. And, indeed, the fate of The Bioscope is bound up with the fate of the part of the city it occupies.
Grant and Els are positive about their prospects. “The time is just so right,” Grant says. “There is excitement around this precinct, around Main Street Life and around Johannesburg. Now is the time to do it.”
“We’re telling the rest of Jo’burg ‘The city is not what you think it is’. We have this new independent cinema. This is big and it’s got great implications for the city,” says Els.
A priority for them is to create a diverse cinema culture in South Africa, catering to the interests of a variety of niche audiences. Months before it was ready to open The Bioscope held a screening in its future venue — then a construction site. The screened work was In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a rare Indian film written by and starring author Arundhati Roy.
“The audience was packed and 90% Indian,” Grant says. “It dawned on us that if we tap into niche audiences people will come. Fordsburg used to have so many cinemas, which have now mostly dwindled away. People in different communities, where there aren’t many cinemas, are hungry for something like this.”
“The idea of different people sitting together in a cinema is really exciting,” says Els. “And you’re just not going to get that in Rosebank Mall or somewhere like that.”
The Bioscope is open every day except Mondays and tickets cost R35. For more information about weekly screenings, visit www.thebioscope.co.za or follow them on Twitter (username: @bioscopetonight)