Abstract
Recent scholarly work on cinema’s past has shown that the audience’s leisure and cinema-going activities were firmly rooted in the sociocultural geographies of cities. This chapter aims at further developing this line of research by experimenting with a bottom-up, data-driven approach to analyse the typology of cinemas in Amsterdam and Antwerp in 1952, 1962 and 1972. It asks if such an approach can provide us with new ways of identifying clusters of cinemas that share a set of characteristics which may or may not be in line with existing classifications. The results of the analysis invite a rethinking of the type ‘premiere theatre’, the relation between run order and seating capacity, and the centre-periphery distinction. The chapter also shows that a ‘scalable’ research framework can provide us with new perspectives on the local cinema cultures that shaped modern identities in the post-war period in their own, unique ways.
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Notes
- 1.
A rich encyclopaedic source that is mainly based on newspaper articles, trade journals and interviews, is Richard van Bueren’s three-part history of individual Amsterdam cinemas (van Bueren, 1996, 1998). Karel Dibbets’ thesis (1980) covers the whole of the Netherlands, but is also an important source for post-war Amsterdam. Moreover, some publications exist about individual cinemas (e.g. Dolfsma, 1985; van Dijk, 2013; Visser, 2012), but a synthetic study of (post-war) Amsterdam cinema life is lacking.
- 2.
Various partial explanations for the difference in market size exist (Sedgwick et al. 2012); a full discussion goes beyond the scope of this paper.
- 3.
The datasets, code and output were gathered in a Jupyter notebook which we ran on the Google Colab service. The notebook and the data are available in a dedicated GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/uvacreate/cinema-context/2021-cinema-programming-amsterdam-antwerp.
- 4.
Using the k-means clustering algorithm, https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html#k-means.
- 5.
A full discussion of the motivation for and operationalisation of those variables is provided in the ReadMe section of the GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/uvacreate/cinema-context/2021-cinema-programming-amsterdam-antwerp/-/blob/master/README.md.
- 6.
Note that this can indicate the same feature that is screened for several weeks; these would be counted as distinct weekly screenings in these graphs.
- 7.
The motivation for this prolongation of specific titles is unclear and requires further research.
- 8.
It should be noted that we only have data for single calendar years, so the data do not show how long a film had been on the market in the city before January 1. To reduce this bias, we have excluded films that were screened before February from this analysis of the run orders.
- 9.
As defined in the ReadMe section of the GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/uvacreate/cinema-context/2021-cinema-programming-amsterdam-antwerp/-/blob/master/README.md.
- 10.
We have defined recent as not older than two years, based on the production year mentioned by IMDB.
- 11.
- 12.
Most likely these are films that only show once in the city or premiered before January 1.
- 13.
The two cinemas in Amsterdam East, Van Swinden and Bio, in terms of their decentralised location could also be expected in cluster 0 there (see below), but are probably grouped in this cluster because they are close to each other, as the cinemas in this cluster share a similar distance to other cinemas as the most distinguishing feature.
- 14.
Film Listings, Het Parool, 8 March 1972, p. 22. Retrieved August 26, 2022, from https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ABCDDD:010833937:mpeg21:p022
- 15.
Film listings, Het Parool, 27 September 1972, p. 12. Retrieved March 19, 2022, from https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ABCDDD:010837225
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Noordegraaf, J., van Oort, T., Lotze, K., Biltereyst, D., Meers, P., Kisjes, I. (2024). Discovering Cinema Typologies in Urban Cinema Cultures: Comparing Programming Strategies in Antwerp and Amsterdam, 1952–1972. In: Treveri Gennari, D., Van de Vijver, L., Ercole, P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_12
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