Old chewing gum, cheap carpet sticky from spilled drinks, sagging seats pitted with cigarette burns: Satoshi Chuma's photographs of old cinemas on show at the National Film Center are fantastically evocative of the decline and fall of celluloid.
Having spent several years working in the projection booth, Chuma has photographed the dark interiors and grimy exteriors of movie houses around Japan for several years. As an exhibition, "Movie Theaters" is not perfect: Some of the prints are perhaps a little too dark, the presentation is fairly rudimentary and monochrome photos of rundown architecture are nothing new. Chuma also, rather profanely, mixes genres. Close-ups of the editing and projection machinery are strongly reminiscent of the "new objectivity" movement of the 1920s and '30s. At other times, when shadowy figures make an occasional appearance in the frame, or Chuma's composition strays from the straight and level, there is the more human and conversational tone of New York School street photography.
The exhibition has ample opportunity to fail, but it doesn't. With less commitment and heart, it could easily have been a retro-hipster project, with less perspicacity it would have been a sentimental nostalgia trip. It succeeds because deriding and distancing oneself from narrative has become something of a mannerism in contemporary art photography, but in Chuma's dream-like images, there seems to be a measured and conciliatory ambivalence toward the desire to feed the unconscious with stories of sex, violence and adventure.