"Seeing with the "Mother Theatre
The sea and cinemas of Cape Town's city centre
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3663504 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fernanda Pinto De Almeida (0000-0003-1506-9468, University of the Western Cape, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 136-153 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Dynamics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0253-3952 • E-ISSN: 1940-7874 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02533952.2021.1906147 |
| OpenAlex | W3152954824 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 13 |
In this essay, I consider the building and demolition of the Alhambra, once known as Cape Town’s Mother Theatre, as a way of approaching the transformations of the city centre in the twentieth century. I show how city planning schemes and segregation policies transformed the central district’s cinema theatres – particularly the area informally called “Theatreland” – and proposed alterations to the seashore land that restricted pedestrian access from and to the sea. My essay identifies three moments that ordered these configurations of the central district and its cinemas, and how they became implicated in the city’s competing aesthetic projects. Cinemas, I argue, offer an important lens onto urban transformations in Cape Town, particularly in relation to the city’s maritime connections and the construction of the Foreshore. I trace these “cinema-scapes,” from their metropolitan ties to civic nationalist symbolism, and the different imaginaries of the public in Cape Town which, I suggest, inform a contemporary nostalgia for cinema
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cape · Geography · Media studies · Movie theater · Sociology · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · South African History and Culture
The Angry Divide
Performing Whitely in the Postcolony
Unburying the Dead in the “Mother City”
Apartheid's Festival
Part II
Unwrapping History at the Cape Town Waterfront
Popular Memory and the Voortrekker Films
Volkskapitalisme
The African Oceans—Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture
The disappointment of nostalgia
Archaeology dreaming
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |