Is Cinema the Last Great Shared Experience?

The ABC cinema on Vicar Lane no longer exists, but a surprising amount of my childhood still seems to be living there.

The building opened as The Ritz in 1934 and survived long enough to witness the arrival of television, video recorders, multiplexes and the internet before finally closing in February 2000. A few years later it was demolished. Today, unless you already know what stood there, you could walk straight past the site without realising that generations of Leeds families once spent their Saturday afternoons disappearing into its darkness.

The ABC Cinema, Leeds. Any resemblance to an old photograph is entirely intentional.

 

Part 1: Memory

I occasionally find myself doing exactly the opposite.

I walk past and remember.

Not continuously. Not in some sentimental, misty-eyed fashion. More in flashes. An old film poster. The smell of the foyer. The anticipation of arriving half an hour early because my parents preferred to leave nothing to chance. Memory tends to work like an unreliable projectionist; the reel jumps forward without warning and entire years disappear between scenes.

One moment I am eight years old watching DuckTales the Movie. The next I am eleven and completely absorbed by The Last of the Mohicans, a film I was technically underage, although only by three months. At the time, this felt wonderfully rebellious. Then suddenly it is 1996 and Independence Day has arrived, blowing up half the planet and convincing an entire generation of teenage boys that alien invasions looked tremendous provided they happened to somebody else.

Somewhere in between were dozens of other films that have become harder to place. The strange thing is that while I can no longer remember every title, I remember the experience of being there with remarkable clarity.

The ABC was never the grandest cinema in Britain. It wasn't Leicester Square. It wasn't Grauman's Chinese Theatre. It wasn't one of those magnificent picture palaces where the foyer resembles an Italian opera house and you half expect a duke to emerge from behind a velvet curtain. It was simply a Leeds city-centre cinema. Yet to a child it felt enormous.

Everything feels enormous when you're eight.

The foyer seemed larger. The posters seemed brighter. Even buying a ticket carried a certain significance. Modern cinemas often resemble airports with popcorn. Efficient, clean, functional and designed to process large numbers of people. Older cinemas possessed more character, even if some of that character was merely ageing carpet and slightly mysterious smells.

The visit rarely ended when the credits rolled.

Across the road stood Nash's Fish Restaurant, which occupied an equally important place in my childhood imagination. The restaurant was famous for attracting actors appearing at the nearby Grand Theatre and the walls were covered with signed photographs and autographs. While waiting for fish and chips I would stare at them for ages.

Most children probably spent their time reading the menu.

I was busy conducting an entirely unofficial investigation into fame.

Who were these people?

What had they appeared in?

Had they really sat in this restaurant?

Looking back, I suspect I was less interested in celebrity than proximity. These people belonged to the mysterious world of films, television and theatre, yet here they were hanging on the wall of a fish and chip shop in Leeds. It was probably the first time I realised that entertainment wasn't some magical force beamed into our living rooms. Real people made it.

The older I became, the more the experience changed.

Cinema visits with parents gradually became cinema visits with friends. By the mid-1990s the film was often only part of the attraction. The city centre itself became part of the adventure. Entire afternoons could disappear wandering through Leeds, visiting record shops, browsing bookshops and eventually ending up at the cinema.

Then came the multiplex era and with it one of the great teenage moral dilemmas: was it acceptable to pay for one film and watch three?

History suggests the answer was usually yes.

Or at least it was yes if you were fifteen, had very little money and possessed the stealth capabilities of somebody who had watched far too many action films.

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Part II: What Those Memories Mean

Of course, none of this was unique to Leeds.

For much of the twentieth century, almost every town in Britain had its own version of the ABC. Some were grander. Some were smaller. Some have survived. Many haven't. Yet they all served roughly the same purpose.

They were places of escape.

The word itself is sometimes used dismissively, as though escapism were a weakness rather than one of humanity's oldest habits. Yet long before cinemas existed, people were escaping into stories. Ancient Greeks escaped into theatre. Victorians escaped into novels. Our grandparents escaped into the pictures. The technology changes. The instinct remains remarkably stubborn.

And who could blame them?

The great boom years of cinema arrived during periods that were hardly overflowing with reasons for optimism. The generation that filled Britain's picture palaces during the 1930s had endured a world war, economic depression and widespread hardship. Yet while factories closed and unemployment rose, cinemas flourished. People queued around the block to spend a few hours somewhere else.

The formula was deceptively simple.

Outside might be grey skies, bills, work and routine.

Inside was adventure.

For the price of a ticket, audiences could travel to Africa, Paris, New York or the Wild West without leaving their seats. They could spend an evening with pirates, detectives, gangsters, cowboys or astronauts before returning home a few hours later.

It was cheaper than a holiday and considerably safer than becoming a pirate.

That same principle was still operating when I sat in the ABC watching films decades later. Looking back, I doubt eight-year-old me was consciously searching for escapism. I simply wanted to watch DuckTales. Twelve-year-old me wanted to see The Last of the Mohicans. Fifteen-year-old me wanted to watch alien spaceships obliterate famous landmarks in Independence Day.

Yet the appeal was essentially the same.

For a couple of hours, you stepped out of ordinary life.

The remarkable thing was that you never did it alone.

That, perhaps, is the point that feels most relevant today.

Modern entertainment offers almost unlimited choice. We can watch practically anything at any time. Entire libraries of films sit waiting behind a remote control. If somebody had described Netflix to cinema audiences of the 1950s, they would probably have assumed it was either magic or communism.

Yet something was quietly lost alongside all that convenience.

The sense of occasion.

A trip to the cinema demanded commitment. You arranged to meet people. You travelled into town. You bought a ticket. You entered a room filled with strangers and agreed, however briefly, to experience the same thing together.

Nobody paused the film.

Nobody checked their phone every three minutes.

Nobody spent twenty minutes trying to decide what to watch before giving up and rewatching something they'd already seen.

The choice had already been made.

All that remained was the experience.

When people remember old cinemas, this is often what they're remembering, even if they don't realise it. They remember parents taking them to see their first film. They remember awkward first dates. They remember laughing with friends. They remember Saturday afternoons that seemed to stretch forever and summers that now feel impossibly distant.

The film itself sometimes becomes secondary.

I can remember standing outside the ABC more vividly than I can remember certain films I watched there. I remember the walk through Leeds city centre. I remember Nash's. I remember studying those signed photographs while waiting for fish and chips. I remember conversations afterwards about whether a film had been any good.

I even remember films I never actually saw properly because I spent half the running time distracted by sweets, friends or whatever else happened to be occupying the attention span of a teenager in the 1990s.

What remains is not a catalogue of films.

It is a collection of experiences.

Perhaps that explains why the closure of old cinemas often feels strangely personal to people who have not set foot inside them for years. The ABC wasn't simply a building. It was a backdrop to hundreds of individual stories. First dates happened there. Family traditions happened there. Friendships happened there.

A cinema accumulates memories in much the same way an old pub does.

Brick by brick.

Year by year.

Generation by generation.

The building becomes important because of what happened inside it.

Today, the site where the ABC once stood is just another piece of Leeds. People hurry past without a second thought. Most have no reason to know what used to be there. Cities are like that. They are constantly rewriting themselves.

Yet every now and then I find myself thinking about the old place.

Not because it was the greatest cinema in Britain.

Not because every film I saw there was a masterpiece.

And certainly not because the seats were especially comfortable.

I remember it because, for a small part of my life, it was one of the places where the world seemed larger, more exciting and full of possibilities. A place where stories unfolded on giant screens, where famous actors stared down from the walls of a fish restaurant across the road, and where childhood gradually gave way to adolescence somewhere between DuckTales, The Last of the Mohicans, Independence Day and countless films in between.

Perhaps cinema is not the last great shared experience.

But when I think about the ABC, it reminds me that the best shared experiences are rarely about the event itself.

They are about the people who were there with us when it happened.  

And perhaps that's the point. 

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More Films Worth Losing Two Hours To

Angel Heart (1987) – Mickey Rourke follows a routine missing persons case into increasingly dark territory. Film noir, voodoo, Robert De Niro with unsettling fingernails, and one of the most memorable endings of the 1980s. Read the review

The Bounty (1984) – Mutiny, empire, tropical paradise and Anthony Hopkins stealing every scene in sight. A thoughtful retelling of one of history's most famous acts of rebellion. Read the review

The Quiet Earth (1985) – New Zealand's greatest science-fiction film begins with a man waking up to discover he may be the last person left alive. Strange, intelligent and surprisingly moving. Read the review

Dark City (1998) – Before The Matrix, there was this beautifully bizarre neo-noir nightmare. A city that never sees daylight, memories that cannot be trusted, and a mystery that grows stranger by the minute. Read the review

The Proposition (2005) – Sun-baked Australian brutality with poetry hidden beneath the dust. A western where civilisation feels only slightly less dangerous than the outlaws. Read the review