MASTERCLASS | Além da última sessão: os cinemas de rua, suas desaparições e sobrevivências

Summary

Talitha Ferraz’s masterclass examines the disappearance, survival, and possible return of Brazilian street cinemas. Her central question for the audience is: “What is the cinema of your life?” She uses personal memories of cinemas to show how these places can become part of people’s identities and relationships with their neighborhoods.

What counts as a street cinema?

Ferraz treats “street cinema” as an open, changing category, not a fixed architectural type. A cinema’s character depends on its location, history, business model, programming, and relationship to the surrounding city. In Brazil, the term is especially useful for distinguishing cinemas that open directly onto streets and sidewalks from those inside shopping malls.

Street cinemas can be understood as:

• Collective leisure spaces integrated into urban life.
• Local landmarks whose signs, posters, queues, smells, and sounds make cinema visible from the street.
• Places of sociability and identity, where audiences meet, share an experience, and carry conversations about a film into other parts of the city.
• Part of the city’s diversity, offering another possible use of urban space alongside shops, pharmacies, churches, and other venues.
• Sensory environments that prepare audiences for viewing before they enter the auditorium. The sidewalk, queue, lobby, and interior all contribute to the experience.

Ferraz stresses that the audience experience begins before the film starts. The journey from street to auditorium can shape anticipation, perception, and the feeling of entering a different time and space.

Rethinking cinema history

A major lesson of the talk is to reject a simple, linear “evolution” of cinema—as if moving images began with a single invention, developed in a straight line, and eventually reached today’s screens. Ferraz instead draws on media and cinema archaeology: technologies, business practices, and forms of exhibition overlap, disappear, return, and change according to local conditions.

Examples from early exhibition include storefront venues, kinetoscopes, mutoscopes, and Vitascope screenings, as well as theaters that combined films with live performances and other attractions. This history complicates the idea that mixed-use venues, “experiential” entertainment, or cinema’s search for a permanent home are uniquely modern developments.

The names and forms of cinemas have also varied: storefront theaters, penny arcades, nickelodeons, salons, warehouses, movie palaces, neighborhood cinemas, multiplexes, gallery cinemas, art cinemas, newsreel cinemas, drive-ins, and others. These categories overlap, and whether a venue counts as a street cinema depends on the specific place and period.

Research approach and methodology

Ferraz describes a broad, locally grounded approach to studying cinemas:

• Study cinemas in the plural. Avoid treating cinema history as one universal story; investigate particular venues, neighborhoods, and cities.
• Situate each case in its context. Consider urban form, geography, mobility, architecture, technology, commercial arrangements, audiences, and social conditions.
• Use interdisciplinary methods. Bring together film and media studies with urban planning, anthropology, sociology, architecture, economics, communication, and philosophy.
• Look beyond the film itself. Examine exhibition, distribution, the venue, the conditions of viewing, audience practices, and how cinema fits into everyday life.
• Treat audiences as real, varied people. They travel to cinemas, socialize, encounter barriers to access, and experience films in specific places and circumstances; they are not an anonymous, uniform audience.
• Work with incomplete evidence. Use archives, oral histories, audience memories, and local research. Gaps and silences are not only obstacles: they can reveal what was preserved, neglected, or excluded.
• Avoid assuming that one venue type is better than another. Different arrangements suit different historical, social, commercial, and urban conditions.
• Consider “going to the cinema” broadly. The experience includes the journey, company, venue, conditions of the screening, and social life around the film—not just watching the film itself.

Current situation and pressures on street cinemas

Citing figures from an Ancine 2025 report, Ferraz describes a highly uneven exhibition landscape. The subtitles give slightly different national totals—about 3,540 or 3,544 screens—but the figures she cites indicate that 87.5% of screens are in shopping malls, compared with roughly 441 street cinemas and 3,103 mall-based screens. She also notes the concentration of screens in the Southeast: the report figures cited include 1,845 screens there, with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro far ahead of many other states.

The numbers are not simply a measure of access. A screen in a large multiplex inside a mall does not necessarily offer the same accessibility as a cinema on a public street. Cost, transport, geography, and social barriers affect who can reach and feel welcome in these venues.

Ferraz warns against explaining closures with just one cause. Depending on the location, contributing factors can include:

• Changes in the film industry, exhibition business, and technology.
• Competition from television, home video, cable, downloads, and streaming.
• The movement of screens into shopping malls.
• Changes in cities and transport, including increasingly car-oriented mobility.
• Limited parking and difficulties reaching street venues.
• Urban violence and socioeconomic segregation.
• Economic crises and changing leisure habits.
• Real-estate speculation and the high value of centrally located properties.
• The exhibition market’s own commercial decisions.
• Weak or inconsistent cultural and heritage protections.

A heritage designation alone may not preserve a cinema’s original use. The survival of a venue can depend on local policy, legal interpretation, community pressure, and whether preservation efforts protect not only the building but also its role as a place of exhibition.

Ruins, memory, and activism

Ferraz uses the idea of urban cinematic ruins to consider abandoned or deteriorating cinemas. Drawing on “hauntology,” she describes these buildings as traces of unrealized futures: they remind people not only of what existed, but also of possible city and cultural projects that never came to fruition.

Rather than viewing ruins only as eyesores or as objects to be nostalgically restored, she argues that they can prompt critical questions about the economic, political, and urban processes that produced their decline.

She distinguishes active nostalgia from a wish simply to return to the past. Active nostalgia uses memories and affection to motivate present-day reflection, organizing, and cultural policy. In this sense, memories of going to the cinema can support activism for preservation, reopening, or continued public access.

Examples discussed

• Cine Carioca in Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro: Ferraz’s own “cinema of her life,” once part of a major exhibition area and now a church.
• Cine Vaz Lobo, Rio de Janeiro: Community organizing helped prevent demolition linked to transport and urban redevelopment plans. The cinema has since been included in a municipal restoration initiative.
• Cine Belas Artes, São Paulo: A prominent survival case involving threats of closure, reopening, heritage protection, and political action, including a parliamentary inquiry.
• Cine Estação, Rio de Janeiro: Audience and artist mobilization supported the independent cinema network during financial and eviction threats.
• Roxy, Rio de Janeiro: A cinema converted into a concert and entertainment venue, illustrating the pressures of real-estate value and changing uses.
• Cine Rio Palace and the Olaria cinema, Rio de Janeiro: Examples of deteriorating suburban cinema buildings and the unequal attention given to preservation across urban areas.
• Cine Rua Pernambuco: A collective and movement that documents cinemas across Pernambuco, promotes public awareness and cultural policy, and has organized mapping, events, workshops, and other activities. Ferraz presents it as a particularly successful example of cinema activism.
• Cine São Luiz, Recife: Discussed as a public cultural facility, illustrating a model in which the state can play an active role in cinema management.
• Cine Íris, Rio de Janeiro, and Cinema Olympia, Belém: Mentioned in discussing how claims about the “oldest operating cinema” depend on how a cinema and commercial operation are defined.

Speakers and sources

Speakers

• Naila, a cultural producer at the Cinemateca Brasileira, introduced the event and Talitha Ferraz.
• Talitha Ferraz, the masterclass presenter.

Researchers, thinkers, and other sources cited

• Ancine, for the 2025 film-market figures discussed.
• João Luiz Vieira, on histories of cinemas, exhibition, and audiences.
• Richard Maltby, on cinema venues and their social and cultural significance.
• Olivier Bodri (name as rendered in the subtitles; spelling may be uncertain), on cinema as a space distinct from everyday urban life.
• Michel Foucault, on heterotopias.
• Félix Guattari, on built environments and subjectivity.
• Jane Jacobs, on street life and urban diversity.
• Janice Caiafa, on urban mobility, flows, gathering, and dispersal.
• Margarida Acciaiuoli, author of The Cinemas of Lisbon.
• Thomas Elsaesser, on film and media archaeology.
• New Cinema History researchers named in the subtitles: Robert Allen, Douglas Gomery, Annette Kuhn, Clara Pafort (name as rendered; spelling may be uncertain), and Dani Trivellato (name as rendered; spelling may be uncertain).
• Mark Fisher and Jacques Derrida, on hauntology and haunting.
• Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee, in the discussion of the Angelus Novus and history’s accumulated ruins.
• Rian Brandão, whose research on a cinema fire in Juiz de Fora was mentioned.
• Helena Zimbrão and Lúcia Santa Cruz, cited in connection with research and writing on cinema mobilization and audience activism.
• HOMER and the Cine Rua Pernambuco collective, mentioned as research and activism networks.