8th Street Playhouse
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Cinema name : 8th Street Playhouse
Address : 52 W. 8th Street Neighborhood : Greenwich Village Years of occupancy : 1929 - 1990s Screens (seats) : 1 (500) Active individuals : Symon Gould (owner), Frederick Kiesler (architect) |
The birth of NYC film societies
Before there were dedicated theaters for experimental films it was common practice for avant-garde filmmakers to hold screenings at traditional or repertory cinemas (repertory programming includes classics from the early days of film such as Charlie Chaplin or silent pictures). For example, Jonas Mekas and other members of the New American Cinema Group screened their films at the 8th Street Playhouse. The 8th Street Playhouse was built to accomodate Symon Gould’s Film Guild established in 1923, perhaps the first site in America to show non-box office films
Quotes & Notes
"The skyscraper hotel One Fifth Avenue was built during 1927, and the strikingly modern movie theater, Eighth Street Playhouse, was built on the site of a number of old wooden buildings near Sixth Avenue. The movie theater, in particular, helped reverse a serious decline on that end of the street caused in part by the building of the Sixth and Eighth Avenue subway lines with mass destruction of buildings over the route."
http://villagealliance.org/eighthstreet-history/
"It was the first theater in New York to revive classic 3-D films, many never seen since their original runs in the 1950s, in an early-1980s retrospective that packed the house nightly, and one of few theaters to program repertory drive-in and exploitation fare in “Sleaze Festivals”.
Shira Peltzman & Casey Scott Culture of Archives, Museums, and Libraries
"Symon Gould founded the Film Guild in New York City in 1923 and was 'perhaps the first to show non-box office film in this country… in Broadway theaters, at the Cameo Theater, and subsequently at the theater which I built and helped design, known as the Film Guild Playhouse, which is now called the 8th Street Playhouse.'"
MacDonald, S. (1997). Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society. Wide Angle, 19(1), 3-48.
"On either December 28, 1928, or February 1, 1929, screenings began at the five-hundred-seat Film Guild Playhouse, which was designed by visionary architect Frederick Kiesler to resemble the bellows-like interior of a still camera (the theater was called "The House of Shadow Silence"), with Grigori Stabovoy's Two Days (1927)."
MacDonald, S. (1997). Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society. Wide Angle, 19(1), 3-48.
http://villagealliance.org/eighthstreet-history/
"It was the first theater in New York to revive classic 3-D films, many never seen since their original runs in the 1950s, in an early-1980s retrospective that packed the house nightly, and one of few theaters to program repertory drive-in and exploitation fare in “Sleaze Festivals”.
Shira Peltzman & Casey Scott Culture of Archives, Museums, and Libraries
"Symon Gould founded the Film Guild in New York City in 1923 and was 'perhaps the first to show non-box office film in this country… in Broadway theaters, at the Cameo Theater, and subsequently at the theater which I built and helped design, known as the Film Guild Playhouse, which is now called the 8th Street Playhouse.'"
MacDonald, S. (1997). Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society. Wide Angle, 19(1), 3-48.
"On either December 28, 1928, or February 1, 1929, screenings began at the five-hundred-seat Film Guild Playhouse, which was designed by visionary architect Frederick Kiesler to resemble the bellows-like interior of a still camera (the theater was called "The House of Shadow Silence"), with Grigori Stabovoy's Two Days (1927)."
MacDonald, S. (1997). Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society. Wide Angle, 19(1), 3-48.
