Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre has lived a long and fruitful life, first opening in 1925 as the silent movie house The Hillsboro Theatre.  Since then, the Belcourt has housed the Grand Ole Opry, The Children’s Theatre of Nashville, the Nashville Community Playhouse, and the Belcourt Cinema.  In 1999, the theatre was forced to close, and a grassroots group of Belcourt lovers formed Belcourt YES! to save the historic venue.   You can read all about the fascinating history on the Belcourt website here.

In years since, the Belcourt has slowly evolved from a historic placard into one of the most vital and respected art house cinemas in the country.  I can count the theatres I truly love on one hand, including the not-unworthy New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, The Tampa Theatre, The Paramount in Austin, and The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto.  But it is the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville that I love the most.

A big part of that is due to the staff’s gutsy, thoughtful, and original programming choices.  I chatted with Programming Directory Toby Leonard about the theatre’s summer schedule, its history, and its future.

If ya haven’t listened to this week’s podcast:

TFT 104 – EVERYBODY’S FINE / PAPER HEART

you may not know that the fine folks at that great repertory cinema The Belcourt Theatre here in Nashville, are offering an absurdly wonderful gift to a new ‘The Film Talk’ Member this week, (it could be you!).

As part of our Pledge Drive the first person who joins TFT at ‘The Fuller‘ level or above this week will receive a ‘Screenwriter Membership’ to The Belcourt.  What does this mean?

Well, ya get $2.50 off of every movie for a year, 20% off all the snack bar goodies and drinks, (except alcohol – don’t wanna go overboard here), a weekly email newsletter, all online booking fees waved, discounts on select special events and, amazingly for the 21st Century, a Monthly Calender mailed to your house, (I know – a guy actually hand delivers it to you – you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren!).

Oh – and the above is for two people. So, if you live in Nashville and love the movies, (I know I’m not the only one), then click on the ol’ Operation Save the Film Talk link:

OPERATION SAVE THE FILM TALK

and sign up.  And if you see me at The Belcourt on occasion please feel free to come over and say hi – I might even buy ya an alcoholic drink – to make up for the one thing the Screenwriter Membership can’t do!

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Oh, and apologies to Belcourt projectionist Matt featured in the photograph above – I haven’t taken pics at the theatre for a while so I keep using the same image of Matt manning the projector at one of the well known local film lover and collector Tom Will’s great outdoor movie events.  I promise to refresh my Belcourt image bank soon!

Superman: The Movie – It’s the simple pleasures that I remember: Marlon Brando’s uppercrust English accent, small town Americana, Gene Hackman’s megalomania, Lois Lane’s sincere but complete missing of the point.

Jett: ‘If there were one film to take to a desert island and the only one I could see for the rest of my life, it would be ‘Andrei Rublev’.  It’s an astonishing, engrossing film that feels like it was shot in the time it was set.  In the 14th century.’

Gareth: ‘I probably haven’t had a more transcendent experience with a film than when I saw ‘Solaris”

Next month, our friends at Film Society of Lincoln Center in NYC will present a week of cinematic mysticism with a complete retrospective of Tarkovsky’s feature films.  We’re going to record a podcast about Tarkovsky in a couple of weeks – and look forward to the extraordinary delight of watching all of his movies before recording.

We’ll save the discussion of the meaning of his films for later; though their power probably can’t be overstated, so I’ll allow myself one comment: Andrei Tarkovsky’s films leave me feeling as if cinema really does matter, make me excited to be alive, and remind me of the privilege of being human.

If you’re in the area we can’t encourage you enough to visit FilmLinc.  And if not, while DVD will be a poor substitute for the enveloping experience of watching this most spiritually expansive director’s works in a cinema, I’d still visit the Mummy in Belfast’s Ulster Museum even if I couldn’t get to the pyramids.*

*Full disclosure: Much as I wish TFT had the budget to house me in New York for a week so I could sit at the Walter Reade Theater in the presence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, only one of which I’ve actually seen in a cinema.  Alas TFT ran on a shoestring even before the economic crisis!  So if you can’t be in NYC for the season, don’t be lonely – we’re in solidarity with you, watching at home.  Actually, it occurs to me that, given that Tarkovsky’s films are as much about the interior journey of the individual human as they are about the macro-spiritual nature of the universe, ultimately each of them needs to be seen twice – once on the biggest screen you can find (try the Max Linder Kinopanorama in Paris if you’re ever there), and once alone in your cave.  Doesn’t particularly matter which order you do it in.

You know, Dear Listener, that The Film Talk is striving for something rare: to be a truly international cinema podcast. Your genial co-hosts Jett & Gareth are men of the world, widely travelled, for whom it would not be an overstatement to assert the core truth of country music: wherever they lay their hats, that’s their home.

While we both now make our caves in the land of Buster Keaton, William F Buckley, Andrew Dice Clay, and the late Bea Arthur, our first encounter with each other was in the hallowed space of Belfast’s only arthouse theatre (or, as the somewhat ridiculous government-endorsed lingo has it: ‘specialist cinema’), the Queen’s Film Theatre.   QFT, more than any other venue, formed my cinematic consiousness over the past two decades – beginning rather inauspiciously with a late night screening of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, later becoming the place where I first saw Kieslowski films, bumped into Albert Maysles, discovered Hirokadu Koreeda’s ‘After Life’, listened to Howard Shore play the temp tracks he shows David Cronenberg when he’s scoring a movie for him, fell for Emmanuelle Beart in ‘Nelly et M Arnaud’, saw a triple bill of ‘Miller’s Crossing’, ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘The End of Violence’, (never saw a David Lynch film anywhere else) and even had a door held open for me by Mike Leigh.  Couldn’t happen in too many other places.

QFT has been a magical place for me; operated as something close to a labour of love for many years, especially when it was one of the few entertainment venues that stayed open in the toughest days of the conflict in and about northern Ireland. It’s changed of course; updated furnishing, rebuilt screens, different seats; some of the romance of the old theatre that you could only get to by knowing where the almost-secret back alley was has gone, but it’s still the place where people in Belfast who want to be surprised by cinema end up every week. I saw ‘In the Loop’ – which could well turn out to be my favourite film this year – there just a few days ago.

And now, QFT has launched a new website – much easier to use than the previous one, which had some of the quaint characteristics associated with Web 1.0

The new www.queensfilmtheatre.com is gorgeous to look at, intuitive to use, and the only criticism I can offer is that no one has yet invented the Star Trek transporter machine, so I can’t get to see the films screening there unless I fly to Belfast. QFT is that rare thing – a cinema with heart, with a touch of the personal, a movie theatre where you can feel at home. We hope that The Film Talk offers something similar; for now, I’m happy to begin this week by paying tribute to one of the best places in the world to watch movies.  And we’d love to hear from you, Dear Listener, about your own cinema shrines – please comment below.