Art movies find a home in region

By Carol Trapani
Poughkeepsie Journal

This witty treatment of the Bard and his words probably would have been given scant notice a decade ago by mainstream audiences — meaning most people. It likely would have been labeled that horror of horrors, an art film, and would have been shown in the few movie theaters that cater to these smaller audiences.

But tastes are evolving as fast as people are getting to know each other through the technologies of television, fax machines, e-mail and the Internet.

Today, ‘‘Shakespeare in Love’’ or the Italian film ‘‘Life is Beautiful’’ probably wouldn’t be considered unusual enough to be shown at an art house.

‘‘We want to show things like that, but not if it’s being shown at 11 other screens in the area,’’ said DeDe Leiber, co-director with her husband, Steve, of Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, one of a handful of movie theaters in the mid-Hudson Valley that show films considered out of the mainstream.

‘‘The main thing is, it is a good movie. But part of our mission is to show things that aren’t going to be seen anyplace else.’’

Art theaters surviving

Audiences won’t find mainstream films at theaters like Upstate, Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock in Ulster County, The Movie House in Millerton in northeastern Dutchess County and Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill in Putnam County.

Art house audiences in America — the people who 50 years ago helped propel the now 80-year-old Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and his dream play films into legend — are tuned in to the more esoteric. These audiences are more apt to turn out for ‘‘Regret to Inform,’’ a documentary by independent American film director Barbara Sonneborn about American and Vietnamese women who lost their husbands during the Vietnam War, or ‘‘Afterlife,’’ a Japanese film of fiction, inspired by the childhood of its director, Kore-Eda Hirokazu, about which memory people would choose to take with them after they died.

While aficionados of out-of-the-box films fill art houses, lovers of film classics have been filling the seats at the Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie for showings of movies such as ‘‘Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.’’

There’s a long tradition of showing movies at the Bardavon, Executive Director Chris Silva said. Now dedicated mostly to live performance, the Bardavon was Paramount’s ‘‘A’’ house in the 1940s, Silva said. ‘‘ ‘Gone With The Wind’ opened here and in Manhattan.’’

The Bardavon’s showing of classic films has brought to the grand theater thousands of people who wouldn’t ordinarily attend a live performance, Silva said. ‘‘Goldfinger’’ and ‘‘West Side Story’’ each drew about 700 people.

‘Glorious movie palace’

‘‘It’s a glorious movie palace,’’ he said. ‘‘What’s really cool is how often do you sit in a theater with 500 people who cheer? And the Wurlitzer organ is playing when they come in and plays them out.’’

The 1928 organ was salvaged by the New York Theatre Organ Society and re-installed in the Bardavon in 1923.

At the Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill, movie mavens get to see first-run showings of quality, if quirky, films such as ‘‘Hideous Kinky’’ and ‘‘Waking Ned Devine.’’

The Paramount was built by the Paramount film company as a movie palace in 1930, said program director Marcia Clark. It has a single screen, organ loft, marquee — key ingredients of movie theaters years ago. ‘‘It’s a really terrific place to see a movie,’’ Clark said.

The movies shown at Paramount and Upstate are called art films probably because in the 1940s and 1950s they were perceived as artistic and outside the Hollywood formula, said Robert A. Frischmuth, owner of RAF Film, the company that exhibits the films at the Paramount.

‘‘These films are low on technical and special effects and strong on human stories and emotions,’’ Fischmuth said. ‘‘Without a story, you don’t have a film.’’

Theaters that show the classics or out-of-the-mainstream documentaries, foreign-language films and films from American independent filmmakers help preserve an interest in America’s movie past and expose audiences to films outside their own frames of reference and points of view.

‘‘These films bring up a lot of important issues a lot of mainstream films don’t bring up,’’ Leiber said. ‘‘This is a broad country and there’s a broad range of opinion. And in mainstream, you only see part of it, and everybody knows it.’’