Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema Barbara Wilinsky Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2001

To paraphrase Robert Morley in Beat the Devil (1953), every assay into cultural studies is a guinea in the bank of cultural capital. Raymond Williams’ views on cultural materialism are still generating interest in this bank, and Barbara Wilinsky’s Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema is one receipt of this transaction. Wilinsky’s tidy historical volume, an elongation of her 1997 dissertation, is bookended with a distinction made by Williams between oppositional and alternative culture: the former is incompatible with and contrary to the dominant culture, while the latter seeks merely to be left alone. [1] Art house cinema, it is argued, is alternative and quietist, offering no threat to the governing practices of representation. This is the view that informs the book and guides a reading of its otherwise straightforward economic history, from the beginnings of film to art house cinema, and on to what we have (whatever we have) now.

Just what art house cinema was then, post–war, when it properly came about, is still in dispute. Using the Italian neorealist Open City (1945), the race problem “passing” film Lost Boundaries (1949), and the Ealing comedy Tight Little Island (1949, erstwhile Whisky Galore!) as test cases—which she continues to use throughout—Wilinksy offers a literature review of how art house cinema has been recognised thus far, vacillating between ex post facto academic definitions and utilitarian industry categorisations. She considers art house cinema by the varying characteristics proposed: its formal property of ambiguity, its particularised production habitudes (national, industrial), and its commercial realities. Deciding on all and none of these definitions, she is correctly inconclusive, although she does emphasise art house cinema’s oft–ignored profitable intent and precarious existence “somewhere in between mainstream cinema and experimental, avant–garde, [and] modernist cinema […] different, but not too different.” [2] 

The pervading cynicism encountered in Sure Seaters is in fact quite refreshingly non–adulatory, buffered by what seems a sincere enjoyment of the films themselves and the environs in which they screened. An abundance of detail is provided on such minutiae as the quality of paper early art house programs were printed on (“ranging from heavy–stock glossy paper to plain copy paper” [3]), what the refreshment options were like (certainly not popcorn—coffee and Danishes were a more probable option), who designed the foyer in any given theatre (Modernists all), and so forth. Tactility is paramount, and there are select pictures included sparingly. Much of this information Wilinsky obtained through interviews with those who ran the original art houses, and she places their endeavour within a wider, pan–cinematic milieu dating from the “little cinema” movement of the ’20s, through Amos “Film–as–a–Subversive–Art” Vogel and Cinema 16, and on to the Landmark Theatre Corporation, which operates fifty–seven art houses—better called art outlets?—in the US today. 

Faultless in her readings, and lucid on history and screening practice, Wilinsky is equally controlled and acerbic on class—a debt to the Marxist legacy of Willams (and, elsewhere in the book, Adorno and Horkheimer). In a decidedly auspicious archival find, she describes a sublimely oblivious Life magazine chart from 1949 that categorises:

different cultural forms and practices as high–brow, upper middlebrow, lower middlebrow, and lowbrow. […I]n the category of “Entertainment,” Life’s chart lists ballet as a highbrow cultural pursuit, theater as an upper–middlebrow activity, musical extravaganza films as a lower–middlebrow entertainment and western movies as an activity for lowbrows. [4]

---