A Look Back: Central Cinema’s First Year of Adventurous Programming

In the spirit of full disclosure, it should be noted that Central Cinema has hosted live episodes of Andrew’s film podcast, Cinematary, on three occasions. Cinematary did not financially benefit from these collaborative events, however. Additionally, Arts Knoxville editor Alan Sherrod hosted a Q&A after a Central Cinema screening of Pulp Fiction.

Central Cinema celebrates their first anniversary this August, and aside from a few film recommendations here and there, we at Arts Knoxville haven’t covered their programming all that much since interviewing the founders ahead of opening night. But how could we? There’s always so much of it. On any given weekend, Central Cinema is likely to screen at least 2 or 3 films worth writing extensively about, be they canonical classics, cult favorites, bizarre curiosities, or new indies not playing anywhere else. For anyone who has grown weary of the tiresome Disney properties marching through corporate multiplexes week after week, Knoxville’s only independent moviehouse has been a constantly rotating embarrassment of riches – there’s just not enough time to see all these fascinating films, let alone write about them. So as a corrective, Arts Knoxville would like to take the theater’s anniversary as an opportunity to highlight some of the most adventurous programming that Central Cinema has offered to local audiences over the past year.

It’s extremely tempting to just list off my favorite titles that have screened at Central Cinema, but their project is such a robust one that no single list of movies could quite capture what they’re up to. Rather, I’ve chosen to highlight 10 series that the theater has programmed – some ongoing mainstays, some one-time-only events – that serve to illustrate the broad diversity of entertainment that Central Cinema has made readily accessible here in Knoxville. It should be noted before getting into the list, however, that this is just scratching the surface – I don’t have time to talk about the Sharksploitation series, but you can bet it happened.

The Late Show

Strange, violent, and often hilarious movies abound at Central Cinema after about 9 o’clock on Friday and Saturday nights. Often appealing to those who enjoy “so bad it’s good” cinematic experiences, The Late Show is the theater’s bread and butter. Like much of Central Cinema’s other programming, the ‘80s are well-represented here with movies like Blood Rage, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, and The Slumber Party Massacre films, but plenty of recent releases have gotten the Late Show treatment as well: there’s Surfer: Teen Confronts Fear (which has gotten multiple reprisal screenings by popular demand) as well as Mandy (last year’s Nicholas Cage vehicle that was all but designed for film programs exactly like this – The Late Show uses a system they call “The Cage Gauge” to indicate exactly what kind of insanity a Late Show audience is in store for). The Late Show has been a weekly feature of Central Cinema’s programming since their very first week of business, and I’d imagine it’s here to stay.

Enjoy the Silents with Kelly Robinson

On the opposite end of any sort of respectability spectrum when compared to The Late Show, Enjoy the Silents is a monthly-ish series celebrating silent cinema from around the world, hosted by local expert of rare and lost silent films, Kelly Robinson (who also runs the Knoxferatu horror event every October). These films have included the film studies mainstay Battleship Potemkin, the crime serial Fantômas, the proto-avant-garde film Ménilmontant, the first African-American-directed film Within Our Gates, and more. Robinson always gives great introductions to these movies that really hype you up to see them, and she typically also brings a delightful slate of short films to lead into the night’s feature. These screenings are significantly cheaper than regular movie tickets as well, which highlights just how much of a service this is for Knoxville film culture.

Martial Arts Theater

The first Wednesday of every month is Martial Arts Theater at Central Cinema, an ongoing journey through the East Asian action canon. Some titles are relatively well-known, like Jackie Chan’s Police Story and the Wu-Tang-inspring 36th Chamber of Shaolin; however, this series features plenty of deep cuts that are beloved by those in the know, like the ultra-violent Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky and the action-horror film The Boxer’s Omen. More classical period pieces have been presented here too, like Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and Come Drink With Me. As someone who needs to brush up on the action canon myself, the opportunity to see some of these movies on a big screen is majorly valuable, and along with Enjoy the Silents, this is a series that really sets Central Cinema apart from the rest of Knoxville’s film scene.

Collaborations with TAMIS

When Arts Knoxville interviewed the founders of Central Cinema last August, one thing they were very enthusiastic about was local synergy: collaborating with other local businesses and organization to really make Central Cinema into not only a business, but a community institution. They’ve made good on that promise in multiple ways (teaming with Pride Fest for But I’m a Cheerleader and EarthFest for Wall-e, to name just a couple), but none moreso than in their ongoing relationship with the TAMIS, the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound. Every couple of months, TAMIS will screen a program of local video clips and home videos from Knoxville’s history, usually centering around some sort of theme: they’ve done “All Business Knoxville” (local commercials), “Tennessee Tunes” (musical performances, like Pete Drake, above), “Knoxville Christmas” (various video pieces documenting the holiday season in days gone by), and “Fairy Tales” (which centers around a live-action adaptation of Disney’s Snow White made here in Knoxville). And in addition to being unique and fascinating, these films are often screened on actual celluloid film, which brings me to…

Film on Film

Another topic of conversation during my Central Cinema interview last year was celluloid, as Knoxville doesn’t have any theaters that regularly project film on film. This has been an aspiration for Central Cinema, and although space and materials are prohibitive, they’ve proven that celluloid projection is indeed possible in their theater with a few key screenings: the noir classic Out of the Past (which I wrote about here), the iconic original King Kong, and Starcrash, all-but-forgotten Star Wars ripoff directed by Roger Corman. I’d love to see Central Cinema work towards expanding this series in the future to make the trip to see a classic film feel just that much more special.

Noirvember

As mentioned in my review of the film, Central Cinema’s celluloid screening of Out of the Past wrapped up “Noirvember,” a month-long exploration of the film noir canon. The series served a dual purpose of letting newcomers experience some of the genre’s biggest titles for the first time (I hadn’t seen Double Indemnity before! It was great!) while reminding purists that the genre is much more expansive and diverse than it’s often given credit for. With neo-noir films like Blade Runner and The Big Lebowski, as well as slasher-adjacent giallo mysteries like Deep Red and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Central Cinema made Noirvember into a simultaneously educational and crowd-pleasing month-long event. I’d love to return to the murky shadows of film noir next November, of course, but I’d also love to see Central Cinema give the same treatment to other under-loved genres.

Kubrick: 20 Years On

One of the most common types of programming at any repertory theater is the series celebrating a specific director. Central Cinema dipped its toe in the format with a weekend dedicated to John Landis, but they really did it right with “Kubrick: 20 Years On,” a 2-month retrospective dedicated to a filmmaker whose work really demands to be watched and obsessively rewatched on the big screen. They weren’t able to program all of his movies (I would have loved to see Paths of Glory), but they managed to screen everything from Dr. Strangelove onward, including the often under-appreciated Barry Lyndon and the once-misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut. I look forward to Central Cinema dedicating this type of career retrospective to another famous auteur soon – deep dives like this just aren’t possible in corporate theaters, and they definitely don’t feel the same at home.

Black History Month

Another point of discussion in our 2018 interview was the fact that Central Cinema’s neighborhood (Happy Holler in North Knoxville) is a gentrifying one, and that the voices and faces represented on-screen at any theater is inherently political. Throughout the year, Central Cinema has highlighted a handful of films by black artists and about black characters (Do the Right Thing and Support the Girls are two great ones that come to mind), but they put a concerted effort into this in February for Black History Month. Although the initial advertising was somewhat controversial online for its focus on blaxploitation cinema, Central Cinema offered a humble and sensitive response before unrolling a much more varied slate of films: Spike Lee’s sprawling biopic Malcolm X was highlighted, as were the silent films of Oscar Micheaux, the cult stoner comedy Friday, Prince’s Purple Rain, Horror Noire (a documentary about black representation in horror), and Ava DuVernay’s powerful mass incarceration doc 13th (which was presented in conjunction with the Christian Community Development Association). Blaxploitation also made an appearance, of course, in the form of a Pam Grier double feature and the genre-defining Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song. Taken as a whole, the series was a historically-minded celebration of just how wide-ranging the canon of African-American cinema is (a programming quality I also remember praising about the Knox Horror Fest – run by the same programmers – back in 2017). This series was great, although I must admit that I’d prefer to see more black filmmakers and characters on screen throughout the year moving forward.

Movie Like It’s 1999

It has recently become fashionable to call 1999 “The Best Movie Year Ever,” and, uh, I dunno about all that. But it was definitely a major turning point in film history and full of examples of cutting edge (and often bleeding edge) work, including one of the most obvious masterpieces of my lifetime, The Matrix. Central Cinema devoted an entire weekend to the 20-year anniversary of the cinema of 1999 with “Movie Like It’s 1999,” a lineup of four films – The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, Magnolia, and Deep Blue Sea – that cover a lot of bases regarding what the heck was going on in the movie world before the turn of the century. (Side note: Enjoy the Silents also celebrated in their own way with the even more playfully titled “Movie Like It’s 1899,” in case you need more convincing that Enjoy the Silents is the absolute best.) I hear that there may be further programming of 1999 movies later on in the year, but I mostly wanted to mention it here as a very specific type of niche thing that Central Cinema is eager to dedicate a not-insubstantial amount of time to exploring/celebrating – it’s exactly the kind of singular program-crafting that only a theater like this can offer.

Unclassifiable Fun

Okay, I’m cheating here – “Unclassifiable Fun” is not an official series at Central Cinema. But it may as well be, considering how often they do one-off events that are only sometimes only tenuously cinema-related but always a blast to attend. There was the Cat Video Fest, which was exactly what it sounds like and supported the Young Williams Animal Shelter; there are monthly Skate Video Nights presented on VHS; there have been multiple Karaoke parties; there are often nostalgia-bait screenings for movie fans of a certain age of films like A Goofy Movie, Space Jam, Good Burger, and Hocus Pocus; there was a Matmos concert (?!) performed on plastic instruments (?!?!?) which was arranged via Twitter with so little notice that I didn’t even have time to consider writing about it. Basically the takeaway here is that Central Cinema is a place where conventional boundaries of “what a theater is for” do not exist. Ultimately, a theater should be for the community that it serves – and I can’t wait to see what kinds of madness that community dreams up for year two.

On their opening night in August of 2018, Central Cinema showed Stephen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark – and in that same inspirationally nostalgic Spielbergian spirit, they’ll be celebrating their one-year “Dino-versary” with Jurassic Park on August 16th through the 18th.