Saturdays, June 6 - 27 at 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
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Toronto's history can be told through its movie theatres. From bustling neighbourhood cinemas and Yonge Street grindhouses, experimental film co-ops, to the corporate rise of multiplex chains and decades of censorship battles, the city's screens have mirrored its cultural, social and political life. In Toronto: Cinema City, journalist and film historian Eric Veillette will lead us through a four-part journey through Toronto's exhibition history, uncovering the theatres, controversies, and communities that shaped how Torontonians have watched movies for 130 years.
About the speaker
Eric Veillette is a Toronto-based journalist specializing in Canadian film culture. His work regularly appears in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Spacing Magazine. He is the editor of The Downtown Theatre, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the history of Toronto moviegoing. A former culture reporter for CBC/Radio-Canada, he is currently journalist-in-residence at York University's Archive/CounterArchive, where he researches film censorship. From 2015-2020 he was the programming director at The Revue Cinema. He’s also writing a book about Toronto’s cinemas and cinephile culture, In the Dark, to be published by ECW Press in 2027.
FULL COURSE (4 WEEKS) (+ HST)
Regular: $88 | Bronze & Silver Members : $81 | Gold Members: $70
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SINGLE TICKETS (+ HST)
Regular: $25 | Bronze & Silver Members: $23 | Gold Members: $20
COURSE OUTLINE
Saturday, June 6
The Nabes: Neighbourhood cinemas, the rise of rep culture, the innovators and the survivors
Decades before the first Cineplex opened at the Eaton Centre, Toronto was a city of neighbourhood cinemas: single-screen houses embedded in culturally vibrant communities. This week we'll trace the rise, decline, and constant reinvention of these local theatres, from early storefront cinemas and postwar picture palaces to the emergence of ethnic cinemas in the 1950s and repertory programming in the 1960s and 1970s at places like The New Yorker, Cinecity, Cinema Lumiere, The 99c Roxy. We'll examines the fight to maintain Toronto's screens in the face of industry consolidation and shifting audiences, and asks what the city's surviving neighbourhood cinemas—The Revue, Fox, Paradise, and Hot Docs Cinema—can tell us about the future of moviegoing in Toronto.
Saturday, June 13
The movie chains: From the Allens to Cineplex
Long before multiplexes and mall cinemas, Toronto’s movie business was shaped by family-run chains. This week we'll explore the rise of the Allen family’s theatre empire, which included the original Bloor Theatre (now Lee’s Palace) and The Music Hall (then the Allen Danforth), and its acquisition by Famous Players in the 1920s, setting the template for the monopolistic corporate control of movie exhibition in Canada. From there, we'll follow the growth of major chains such as Famous Players and Odeon, the postwar boom in drive-ins, the arrival of the first multiplexes, and the spread of mall-based cinemas that reshaped how and where audiences watched movies to ask: what happens to moviegoing when the corporate chains begin to falter?
Saturday, June 20
Classified by the Ontario Board of Censors
For much of the 20th century, every film shown publicly in Ontario was subject to review by a provincial censorship board empowered to cut, ban, or restrict what audiences could see. We'll examine the extraordinary reach of the Ontario Board of Censors and the resistance mounted by exhibitors, artists, and filmmakers in Toronto, as well as filmmaker Larry Kent’s defiance of the board at Cinecity in 1968, the history of Cinema 2000 on Yonge Street and its use of loopholes in the Theatres Act, and the board’s increasingly draconian turn in the 1970s that galvanized a generation of experimental filmmakers and video artists to push back.
Further Viewing: The Adjuster
Saturday, June 27
The Grindhouses
This week, we'll look at various Yonge Street grindhouses like the Rio, the Coronet, the Biltmore, book store peep shows, the moral panic during the "Clean-Up Yonge Street" period of the late 1970s, and its effect on the LGBTQ+ community. It will also examine how the Alhambra, along with the theatres that are now know as Hot Docs Cinema and Paradise, operated as soft-core adult cinemas through the 1970s and 1980s.
Photo credits:
Hot Docs Theatre as the Capri, 1967-68 - David Dymond Collection courtesy of Paul Moore
Opening night of the Eglinton Theatre, 1936 - Archives of Ontario
CNE grounds, 1899, with the Lumiere Cinematographe tent - CNE Archives