Marchand and Meffre: Only Time Will Tell

Interview - January 2022

The French photographic duo Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been documenting the crumbling theatres and picture palaces of North America since 2005. Using a large format camera the pair have captured these once lively buildings in their current state; some dilapidated, abandoned and empty, some now living second lives as bus garages or basketball arenas.

Here, Jonathan Tuckey interviews the pair about their work and influences and we present a series of their photographs including a selection from their new book, Movie Theatres.

JT Your work seems to me both heroic and dystopian. What were the origins of your theatre project?

RM & YM We started as young explorers/photographers, visiting modern ruins mostly around Paris, and countries nearby such as Belgium, Spain, Germany or UK but there was one place among all the others that fascinated us : Detroit. We originally discovered the city throughout the work of Camilo Jose Vergara, and Lowell Boileau’s website “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit”.

At that time in Detroit, back in 2005, you could find almost every type of archetypal American building in a state of ruins, from hotels, offices buildings, schools, even police stations, factories, to the famous Michigan Train Station. Among all those buildings there were some old movie theaters left abandoned, and among those there was the United Artist Theater. It was one of the theaters of United Artists studio founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith. They decided to design their flagship theaters in a very ornate spanish-gothic style which make their cinemas absolutely unique. Only 3 of them were built in such a style (one is still operating in LA after having been used for decades as a church, the one in Chicago was demolished back in 1989), and the one in Detroit has been abandoned since its closure in the early 80's and its future is still very uncertain. It gives you an idea of how proportionally things went for movie palaces, most of them closed and were demolished, a few were fortunately saved and some stay abandoned waiting for their fate...

That visit to the cavernous auditorium with natural light pouring from the hole in the ceiling of the neo-gothic decor made a very strong impact on us. As Europeans, and especially coming from the Paris suburbs, we were not accustomed with that displays of exotic and monumental eclecticism in the architecture and also we haven't seen before such a magnificent building that was in such a dilapidated state which made it almost looking like geological, like a temple of some vanishing civilisation... So once we were back from this trip in Detroit we started digging on the Cinema Treasures website which is meant to be an open database of all the cinemas that have ever existed, from the vanished ones to the ones that are still operating. From then it always has been our main way to research these theaters, spending countless hours online. We found that there were plenty of them, especially in the NY area that had been closed and forgotten for decades. Once we had gathered enough research we immediately planned a visit to the NY area, along with a return to Detroit. In June 2006 we also made our first exhibition together in Paris about Detroit. It really confirmed us that we could potentially take pictures and with exhibitions we could reimburse our travel expenses in order to keep going. We then bought a pair of large format cameras and in October of 2006 we were back to the US to start the theaters project.

JT The subject of reuse in your theatre project stands in stark contrast to your Ruins of Detroit, and Budapest courtyards projects. Can you give me your thoughts on this?

RM & YM Indeed, in Detroit our focus was mainly about decadence, it was also more about exploration, the style of photography was much more immersive. But it seems to us the main difference was mainly coming from the buildings themselves which were mostly completely vacant except for instance the Michigan Theater which became a flamboyant parking lot. In Detroit the buildings we visited were mainly devoid of any people with only left artefacts as reminiscence of them.

When we started visiting theaters around NY in 2006, accompanied with former projectionnist Orlando Lopes, we quickly stumbled upon theaters that were simply reused for other purposes such as the Brooklyn Paramount Theater that was reused as a basketball court, and that contrast between the baroque decor and the new use immediately struck us. In terms of visuality, the baroque moldings constituted a form of over-framing of our everyday. Exposing our contemporary reality in its most banal expression, and in this reversal that is our everyday which becomes the spectacle. These repurposed theaters were therefore strange ruins, which combined visually our past hopes and our current condition. It was visually amazing and very powerful symbolically. Over the years we gradually had to adapt our photographs to the new added elements, such as air conditioning pipes that were so physically visibles that they dictate some of our framing. So it is really the subject that physically invaded our work, but this was not something we had anticipated at the very beginning, in 2006.

If we have to define what are the similar aspects to our subject we could say that we've always been particularly sensitive to buildings which strongly embody an era, an ideology, or a state of mind and which relates to several temporalities. As such, we are often looking for examples of syncretic, spectacular, sometimes outrageous architecture which embody at the same time the idea of community and collective destiny. In addition to that, those buildings often refer by their architectural style to succession of empires and are already a strong evocation of historical cycles. All of that really connects to that idea that buildings and their metamorphoses could give us a very evocative portrait of the society and its changes. In that way we feel like decay and evolution of a building are just two sides of the same medal. In the theaters, it is just that the decay and the metamorphoses often combined together, makes this subject symbolically more complex.

What was indeed interesting compared to those other abandoned modern buildings was this idea of ​​continuity, rather than of a historical end, but a continuity without what we could consider as a moral "progress". There was a symbolic devaluation of those places and it then became more troubling and subjective at the same time. In a way it kind of thwarted our expectations for romantic or apocalyptic ruins, like the ones we had visited until then. It led us to various paths, titillating our spirit of deduction, questioning and even constraining our imagination, and pushed us to reconsider the very notions of decadence, historical conservation, morality, and aesthetics. It almost seemed to us to be a form of demystification of the “classical ruin”.

Regarding the Budapest Courtyards project, the writer Claudio Magris, in his book Danube, describes the Magyar's capital as: "one of those landscapes where history mingles with anticipation, as in the future metropolises of science fiction films such as Blade Runner: a posthistoric future, a Babel made up of composite crowds, not belonging to any nation or ethnicity. [..]"A form from nowhere, but everywhere at the same time”.

In a way we feel like there was almost a will to rapidly define a cultural identity in an always accelerating and increasingly ‘global’ world. At one time the Budapest buildings and the American theaters were also mushrooming quickly and repeatedly on an industrial scale and they both presented a form of synthesis of historicist and eclecticism styles that could be found at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Because of that we found them relatively similar even if it's something that couldn't be seen at first sight.

What is then probably the main difference between Detroit, the theaters, and Budapest, is that buildings in the Hungarian capital never really changed in use. There were obviously significant events, the second world war happened, apartments were subdivided during the communist era, the 1956 attempts of revolution... But most of the apartments there are now still occupied and inhabited. There were no major symbolic and visual changes in their history, just a slow decadence.

JT Passing time is felt very strongly in your work. If you could speculate, what will you be photographing in 20 years time?

RM & YM We were not yet really focused on modern ruins that were related directly to climate change, and/or to natural disasters caused by global warming and our current environmental issues. However in the near future it is unfortunately less and less excluded that we will soon be looking at places whose ruination would be mainly attributable to our direct management of resources.

JT All your projects record the physical consequences of a sort of devaluation. As an urban location gains economically buildings tend to be demolished and replaced, why are you drawn to representing this subject matter?

RM & YM It’s true that while a lot of photographers were going to China or Dubai, we were shooting Detroit and Budapest, the new falling empires…

Like many people we always had a fascination for abandoned places and ruins, and places that were about to change; landscapes and buildings that are on the edge of vanishing. When you're looking at a façade and you can feel the flow of time - it's something that is always moving.

In the course of history many writers had thoughts about this particular fascination for ruins. Decay is none other than the erosion of time on buildings, this makes our ruined construction almost geological, organic and, as has often been pointed out, this creates an obvious proximity of destiny between men and their constructions once they are on the verge of disappearing.

It probably goes back to that idea of a memento mori, and we're probably confronting the idea of our own disappearance, and re-enacting something that dates back from when we were children that has to do with the Sublime, when we were looking at a world that seems both endless, and incredibly mysterious at the same time. Visiting ruins would make you really feel that. The excitement of discovery, the thrill of danger, and the satisfaction of finding your own answers and learning through those visits, it's almost like an initiatory route.

From a psychological point of view it may have to deal with the fact that since our childhood we were fed with the idea that the days of tommorrow would probably be worse than those of today. We've inherited that unconscious global anxiety and that might be one of the reasons why we're so focused on things that are ending or declining. This is probably a very common feeling in Europe, where we’re constantly surrounded by history, this feeling of old countries that are progressively losing their power and influences over the world, that's probably things that are part of our psyche.

Regarding our role as photographers, French historian Alain Schnapp speaks of “fragments becoming ruins”', when they become useful or necessary, they become “markers in the landscape”. The role of photographers, although modest, would therefore be trying to take these fragments that have slipped into oblivion, floating almost like subconscious memory, and to make them useful and necessary by reintegrating them into the collective memory. As a photographer you just feel more useful documenting things that are about to disappear.

There is also a slightly more political aspect to photograph disappearing objects. When a building is abandoned it is probably the most interesting time "to intervene" because even if it is often in the first place guided by the simplest candid curiosity and sometimes the thrill of the forbidden, when you cannot get a proper permission to visit “the act of exploration or transgression” is not completely trivial and takes on a slightly more committed, almost “political” meaning since it is a question of bearing witness to an alternative history and geography which often undermines the dominant narrative scheme. Most of the spaces are often private: real estate market, industrial and private interests could easily obliviate those landscapes and history to the detriment of the community. Almost despite themselves, the photographers, visitors or the “urbexers” to use the current terminology, are thus exposing things that remain beyond the official limits of what we would have to see. It is probably one of the major themes of this approach, to free itself from the main narrative and rules and challenge their legitimacy.

JT What artists, filmmakers do you look to for inspiration? What is the reason you work and exhibit your work in series?

RM & YM Our visual culture is influenced by many artists of every sort, from photographers, painters, drawers, architects, filmmakers and cinematographers, to CGI artists with their great aptitude to create a special atmosphere through their understanding and respect of lights. The obvious references would probably be the Bechers, then Tarkovsky, Terry Gilliam, cinematographer Roger Deakins, Piranesi, Escher... there are really many!

We do like the repetitiveness of a series, the encyclopedic amount of infos or at least the feeling of it. The idea with our project being developed as a series, is that at some point it feels to us like every image should make you look to the next one with greater attention. For instance in the theaters series there are a lot of images of the repurposed theaters that wouldn't be understandable if they were placed at the beginning of the book. The idea is that when you reach the end of it you kind of become a very fine observer of the subject, almost like a specialist just by getting your eyes customized to that form of architecture.

When people were leaving the exhibition about the Budapest Courtyards at Polka gallery in Paris, we noticed that a lot of them were looking up to the courtyard where our gallery is located. It means that it gives them some additional attention to it. It might obviously not last long, but if it could create at least this very small effect for a short time, that little extra sensitivity, our goal would be accomplished.

JT There is an obvious parallel between the photography of Hilla and Bernd Becher recording the vanishing industrial buildings of Northern Europe. Thematically, stylistically and as a collaborative partnership.

RM & YM Yes, we really admire their work. If we had to pick one work of photography it would be theirs.

They really achieved something incredible, and they were really drawn by that idea of conserving buildings and memories through their photography, plus they add a fantastic formality and rigour to it but in a way they were following a tradition of German photographers making collections and typologies even if that is really what make them famous. Even if this b&w typological style could look cold and distant, we don't think the images they made are devoid of emotions, you could really tell that there was a passion for their subject. Whereas a lot of the photographers reunited and labeled as new topographics we’re shooting to illustrate the progressive sanitization, suburbanisation, globalization of the landscape and ordinary life, the Becher were shooting what they noticed as remarquable and was about to disappear. To us it’s really what makes them stand aside, they mainly shoot out of the attachment for their subjects.

And it's really a source of motivation to us to imagine them climbing around rusty blast furnaces all day long with their 8x10 camera to find the perfect point of view as early as in the 60’s and 70's and seeing them keeping going on for over 40 years... this was pure dedication and it's just always very humbling to think about them.

JT It seems you record the image of the high and low art with equal reverence, the proscenium and the pretzels, the cornices and the crisps. Fredric Jameson points to one of the conditions of postmodernity being a breakdown of the distinction between high and low culture. Your theatre project and the way you record them seems to resonate with that?

RM & YM Cinema itself was indeed a reunion of those ideas, having the appearance of extra high class aristocratic fanciness but being dedicated to the mass audience. At the beginning, the movie industry borrowed from the codes and decorum of European operas and classical theaters to gain that legitimacy and to be seducing. What we also have to remember is that the reproducibility of film was already a primary form of dematerialization and allowed for a large scale diffusion, replacing numerous forms of live entertainment that had been there for centuries and thanks to that within a few years the cinema became the dominant leisure. Those places then became the main sites of diffusion for the American mythology, witnesses to and protagonists of the national narrative making the American imagery and his way of living massively spread worldwide within a few decades. But all of that was part of the same gesture that brought us from this collective experience in an auditorium of 3000 seats to our present day, when most of humanity is attached to a personal screen, and that led the previous form to decline.

JT Towards the end of your Theatres series there are several images where the completeness of the original environments is eroded (Paramount, Uptown, Kenosha Theatres). Plaster has fallen away and the structure that supports the interior is revealed. I find these very interesting as these interiors are revealed as equally temporary and light weight as the new uses that have been added within.

RM & YM Yes we do like the fact that beyond the fancy plaster, is just a lace of metal, it's just a decor, an illusion and it's precarious in its own way. We really like the technical and industrial architecture, especially when both are mixing together with vernacular fancy elements, and when the technical structure of a theater is partially revealed it really brings them back to their industrial essence.

As such we really like the image we made of the Delancey Theater, because in a way when we entered the auditorium it was a bit disappointing to see such a beautiful theater totally gutted, but the structures themself proved to be very interesting.

NOTES

Many thanks to Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for their participation and for sharing their work with us.

All photographs © Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Posted 14th February 2022.