Jay Schwartz & Secret Cinema - P.A.W. Print

Jay Schwartz, director of Philadelphia's Secret Cinema, has been collecting and showing 8mm and 16mm films, since he was in high school. He started out with silent films. In college, Schwartz came across and purchased a 16mm sound projector. Now 46, Schwartz has operated the Secret Cinema since 1992.

"It's a floating repertory film series, generally in Philadelphia, though I've done events elsewhere also," Schwartz says.

It's not that the locations are undisclosed. Schwartz posts flyers and alerts newspapers about upcoming events. It's more that the locations aren't typical film venues-- like movie theatres.

"I'm not trying to be secret," Schwartz says, "This is a statement that what I show is otherwise un-shown."

A Philadelphia native, Schwartz grew up going to the Theater of the Living Arts. The TLA, as a movie theatre, was always known for showing somewhat outré films. They weren't your typical Hollywood flicks. As much as he loved the TLA, the films didn't show exactly what he wanted.

"Everything that dealt with the 60s and rock and roll and pop culture appealed to me," said Schwartz who loves short films the most, including commercials from the 60's. Schwartz figures that anything can be interesting for 10 minutes or so. If someone doesn't like it, little has been lost.

The Secret Cinema's mission is grander than even Schwartz had envisioned. He noticed that those who were showing old movies weren't presenting the same kinds of films he wanted. Others put on either foreign films or very famous films. "I wanted to show more kind of cult and obscure and oddball things that were ignored by those types of theatres."

Just as the Secret Cinema began to thrive--- inasmuch as a theatre with no fixed location can, most other traditional repertory houses began to fold.

While those remaining theatres continued to evolve, their tastes and Schwartz's became more shared. Schwartz says, "The others didn't become more mainstream, [but] they became more like me." Schwartz, meanwhile, continued to push further toward the obscure. He "showed films that no one could possibly show without using [his] own film archives."

Schwartz, who also collects a limited number of 35 mm short films, which are not available at distributors or in catalogues. He approaches each setting with a businessman's mentality. He refers to an auditorium as "my flagship venue." In general, however, Schwartz tends to put on events that will draw more people to bigger places. He saves the smaller sites for showing films which he deems are less popular. The audience size varies between 25 to 300 people.

The venues are constantly changing. Schwartz says he's shown films in over 50 places in Philly alone, not to mention selected, "other" cities. Currently, Schwartz has begun a season of outdoor films at 40th and Walnut, on the University of Pennsylvania campus. At the low end, are tiny nightclubs like Bar Noir and North Third. At the high end, he's had some shows at The Trocadero. Schwartz has even presented films in people's living rooms, which he says, surprisingly enjoyed a fairly high attendance.

The toughest part of Schwartz's job lies in simulating a theatre environment in places that aren't traditional film-watching places, such as night clubs and coffeehouses. He dims lights. He moves furniture to improve sight lines. He patches his sound projector into the existing speakers or brings his own. Then, he projects 16mm films onto a giant screen in their original film prints--- never video. The original may be a quarter of the area of anything that would appear at The Bridge: Cinema de Lux, but the format is superior to any video, even DVD. And his screen makes the size comparable.

If there is an average age for the viewers, Schwartz believes it to be in the 20 to 30's range, with people in their 60's populating the highbrow end. Most viewers are young people seeking an alternate place to go out or those people who stay abreast of the listings in local newspapers. Viewers who subscribe to his email list or check out his website at www.voicenet.com/~jschwart, stay up on all the "Secret" rendezvous'.

Six or seven years ago, Secret Cinema began showing something very unusual: home movies of complete strangers. Schwartz pulled the best and most interesting of movies made between 1920 and 1960 out for public display. Schwartz defends this peculiar cinematic fancy, suggesting that he was an early champion of this genre. Historians have begun looking toward home movies as viable, historical documents. Because the medium was so expensive, amateur film makers tended to be more concise. Today, home videos, captured on ubiquitous camcorders, document trivial, repetitive events-- like birthday parties and graduations. That's fine, says Schwartz--- people always have tried to capture "priceless" moments. However, the home vid's are not as revealing, unfortunately, because the creators, taking advantage of the fact that videotape is inexpensive, end up recording hours of events which they may never watch, whose historical time-capsule data are eventually lost to a closet, attic or trash pail.

When SC was founded, it provided merely a great excuse for Schwartz to buy films he wouldn't have purchased ordinarily. For him, SC is in between a business and a hobby. "Whatever profile it has," he says, "it's only as high-profile as it is because I've run it like a business."

Schwartz adds, "Then again, it's not a real business, because it would have gone out of business if I had to answer to investors, because they wouldn't be very happy with their returns. Or if I had to pay myself a real salary."

Nearly 13 years later, the same mentality holds. As for the future of Secret Cinema, Schwartz has no master plan. He's had various odd jobs over the years. Recently he's been a paralegal. As far as he knows, he'll run it forever, but he was surprised at SC's success thus far.

"I didn't see it lasting this long, frankly," says Schwartz who adds, "When I started it, I didn't know it would last more than one year. It's kind of taken on a life of its own."

All Secret Cinema events are detailed on Schwartz's site, http://www.users.voicenet.com/~jschwart/ .