Earlier this month, it was announced that the Oban Phoenix Cinema would be closing, with all staff made redundant. It was a familiar tale.

Bathgate Cinema is to turn into the building’s original purpose as a place of worship. The New Picture House cinema in St. Andrews was to be turned into a luxury sports bar at the hands of Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake until opposition reversed track. Belmont Cinema in Aberdeen, Edinburgh Filmhouse, and Dundee Contemporary Arts cinema are fighting for the funds to continue screening. Their hopes lie in the generosity of the public to spare the support.

Scotland’s cinemas are dying out. But the problem doesn’t lie with us. Cinemas across the world are stuck in a broader trend of closing shop, from the average chain to the most independent and passion-driven arthouses.

It’s a sign of the economic times – luxuries like cinema trips are the first things to become scarcer, and cinemas can only compensate for this shift through ticket price rises and marked-up confectionary. It’s a cycle where the problem buries itself deeper.

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In times of strife, our relationship with cinema and the arts becomes more convenient, more comforting. It’s less an activity geared toward social, communal, and societal purpose. Instead, it’s more likely to fulfil a void left by a lack of meaning and understanding elsewhere. The experience becomes much more personalised and internal. This is counterproductive when trying to get a sizeable amount of people in one room together to gaze at the same big screen and form this almost invisible connection.

It’s hard to avoid the topic of the pandemic when it comes to the fortunes of cinemas. When cinemas reopened, audiences were slow to return, and seating capacity had to be much more limited. Audience gambits such as the Christopher Nolan-directed Tenet, which struggled financially and with critics, failed to provide the spark that would encourage people to take their movie-watching outside of much safer, virus-free, surroundings.

Attempts to reignite this dulled spark in the cinema-going public have created a trend in major film – ‘event cinema’, where a world of marketing, internet virality, and traditional watercooler chat collide and feed into the wider fear of missing out. Most reading this probably made an event out of Barbie or Oppenheimer, and a lot saw both films in theatres as one gigantic Cthulhu-inspired entity under the name Barbenheimer.

Studios had to adapt to the new homebody situation in other ways, focusing on streaming and digital to-rents. This provided the studios with some sort of presence and revenue, but its effect is that the genie is out of the bottle. It turns out people like their home comforts, and the connection between the public and the need to experience film in a theatre has become severely damaged, as tenuous as that connection had already become.

Cinema attendance is still short of the pre-pandemic average in the UK and throughout most of Europe (Image: Unsplash)
While the average chain cinema functions much like any other rise-and-fall free market enterprise, independent and arthouse cinemas bear the mental and cultural brunt. Glasgow Film Theatre would struggle to survive through its commerce if it did not see institutional financial support. Often that is a requirement to have a fighting chance and not fall into some sort of administration.

The cinematic experience is changing, and traditional visits to the cinema might become a thing of the past. Traditions are not always promised to us, and over time they can change. As our connection with film evolves and different people engage with it in different ways, we might see a completely new relationship between viewer and screen emerge.

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That organic progression doesn’t discount the value of the big screen experience, however. There is a reason why it has maintained its form solidly throughout film’s history regardless of the surrounding technological advances. It provides the most authentic, spiritually connective way to view a film. A dark room consumed by the screen's light with others experiencing the same thing is a strange but perfect situation for humans to connect through. It would be much for the worse to lose that.

But it’s not up to us, the public, to save cinemas. It should not be left to public fundraising campaigns and placed in the hopes of shaky institutional support. Cinema deserves to play a strong, integral role in our lives. It has proven that it can change lives, inform our senses, alter perspectives, entertain, educate, and help us understand one another. If that relationship remains stable, cinema has no worries about surviving.

Cinemas will likely struggle into the future, and it won’t be surprising in the slightest if more Scottish cinemas fold soon. It’s a harsh reality. Without a solid infrastructure and the imagination to see the scope of cinema’s potential, it’s probably the only reality.