Zanzibar's Majestic, the last cinema standing (feat. Nick Broomfield)

"Only in Theaters" concludes with the cautionary tale of the Majestic. Africa's island region of Zanzibar used to be movie crazy — but today just one cinema remains: The Majestic, a 1950s-era building with roots that go back even further.

Host Rico Gagliano speaks to folks around the world about the wild glory days of Zanzibar's cinema culture, why it's now on the brink of extinction...and then takes hope from an itinerant film programmer 6000 miles away in Amsterdam. Featuring celebrated documentarian Nick Broomfield (KURT & COURTNEY, MARIANNE & LEONARD: WORDS OF LOVE).

The second season of the MUBI Podcast titled “Only in Theaters” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor. A place to discover and watch beautiful, interesting, incredible films. A new hand-picked film arrives on MUBI, every single day. Cinema from across the world. From iconic directors, to emerging auteurs. All carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go

Transcript

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I'm aware of the dangers of nostalgia. Everything wasn't actually better back in the day, but at least one thing just inarguably was. We had more movie theaters. When I was a tween in the eighties I lived in a little suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and within three miles of my house were four cinemas. Where you could choose your experience. I remember one day going to an afternoon screening at the Denis, our no frills four screen neighborhood joint, decorated in shades of splotchy gray to see Heaven Help Us, a teen dramedy set at a Catholic school in the sixties.<i>Hey, listen, I just found out if you get the Pope to wave at you</i><i>when you're together that means you can have sex without sin.</i><i>Your ass.</i><i>No, really, because then you're as good as married in the eyes of the church.</i> Then a few hours later, I biked a mile and a half north to the art deco single screen, South Hills Theater. A red curtain mini palace where a local organist played an overture on the theater's original 1928 Wurlitzer.<i>I have come to commission work from you.</i> Before a screening of Milos Forman's Amadeus.<i>What work?</i><i>A mass for the dead.</i><i>What dead? Who is dead?</i><i>A man who deserved a requiem mass and never got one.</i> A few hours and a couple of miles to go from 1965 Brooklyn to 18th century Vienna, in suburban Pittsburgh. That was the eighties. In the nineties I moved to L.A. And over the years, whenever I came back home for a visit, I noticed the lines outside the Denis getting shorter and shorter until it closed in 2004. By then, the South Hills Theater was gone too. I remember driving past during a storm. The rain was pouring right through the marquee. Might be the first time I felt old. That scene wasn't unique to Pittsburgh. Between the mid-nineties and today, the U.S. lost around 2000 movie theaters. The thing is, it could be worse. There are still two cinemas left in my home suburb, more a short drive away. In fact, I looked at the most remote town in America. It's in Kansas and they've got a cinema, too. But imagine having one theater in your whole country and it's barely working. And it's close to collapse. I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI podcast. MUBI is the best way outside a theater to see beautiful, hand-picked cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinema. Today we wrap up season two. We've been calling it Only in Theaters. Every week we tell you the story of a single cinema that made history. We're leaving you with one that practically is history. A mid-century theater called The Majestic. That's the last one left on an island that used to be movie crazy. It's a kind of magical building. It's just an incredible cinema full of secrets and culture. That celebrated documentarian Nick Broomfield. And I spoke to him and folks around the world about why they love the Majestic. About the cinema culture it symbolizes. And about what will be lost if it goes. Literally every year with the rains. I fear that we'll wake up one day and we will find the roof has caved in. The ultimate tale of vanishing cinemas. And then later, some solace for those of us who love to go to the movies. Ticket please. Enjoy the show. Zanzibar. Just the word universally evokes some place intoxicating. But you might not know where it even is. I didn't. So quick geography lesson. It's a series of islands, two big ones and a bunch of small ones off the east coast of Africa. It's got its own semi-autonomous government, but it's officially part of Tanzania. The mainland, which used to be called Tanganyika. It's a three hour ferry ride away. Back in 2014, Nick Broomfield showed up in Zanzibar for its annual International Film Festival. He fell in love, especially with one of the region's biggest and oldest towns, Zanzibar City. It's an amazing place. It's probably like something you've never seen before because it's a mixture of, you know, Arabian architecture, very ornate, a lot of sort of latticework, sort of almost fantastical architecture and with a kind of African influence and a colonial influence too. Then one day, the festival's director took Nick on a tour of a more modern building built circa 1954. He said, "I want to show you this place. It's called The Majestic Cinema. It's the last operating cinema in Zanzibar." The Majestic was on quite a busy street, but it was still a lot of sort of donkeys and people pulling carts around, you know. Zanzibar has its own particular dusty charm. And... it's a kind of magical building. It has sort of faded glory to it. There were posters for Indian films that were hanging up on the wall as you walked in, the wall was a sort of wonderful turquoise green color, a bit sort of peeling plaster. And then you went into this quite big auditorium. It's got a lot of its old seats in it still. They're very tattered, but they have the beauty of old cinema seats that were probably installed in the twenties. You know, the roof leaks, they've replaced the original roof with a corrugated metal roof that reverberates when it rains and lots of water comes through. Then at the back of the theater, Nick's guide pointed out a little door. A nondescript looking door really it's sort of made out of wood. And they opened it and there was a sort of teeny little kind of room in there, and a bit like a royal box in the theater. And he explained to me that that was where the sultan, the sultan of Zanzibar, could sneak in and out, maybe sneak in with a mistress or sneak out if he didn't like a film and no one would know he was there. So it was.. It's just an incredible cinema full of secrets and culture. And you felt, you know, this place needs to be saved. Not just for the sake of preserving a historic place, but also as a reminder of a historic time when the region, cinema culture wasn't on life support. It was as alive as can be. Yeah, I'm Laura Fair, I'm a professor of African History at Columbia. Laura Fair wrote the book on 20th Century Tanzanian movie-going. It's called Reel Pleasures. That's R-E-E-L. And she says. Cinema was huge in Tanzania, at one point, at its heyday in the 1960s, every major town had at least one. Most places had two cinemas and they were absolutely packed, particularly on the weekends. Tanzania actually had more cinemas than any place on the continent, except for South Africa. And one of the first of those cinemas was built where the Majestic now stands by a guy named Adamji Jariwalla. The unlikely godfather of the region's cinema scene. He started out basically as a cloth trader. He was a young boy who was initially hired by firms in Bombay to basically bring cloth to markets across the Indian Ocean. And at one point somebody said, "Oh, we've got this new fangled thing, you know, a handheld camera and a couple of films. Why don't you take these?" So he started, he brought them with and started showing shows when the ship would reach port. And it was a way for him to earn a little extra money on the side. And he was the one who really inaugurated the industry in Tanzania and Zanzibar. Eventually, other traders caught on. This was a pretty lucrative side hustle. They also started tucking in movie reels along with their cloth imports and showing them around the region at first in tent cinemas. But in the 1920s, Jariwalla had something built, the likes of which Zanzibar had never seen. So the Royal Cinema, which was the first picture palace. Yeah, it was a palace. It sat 800 people. It was one of the grandest stone buildings in town. There were definitely other stone buildings, but certainly nothing that was built for entertainment. So there would be the courts, but that's not exactly some place where people go for a good time. The Royal, which would later be renamed the Majestic, was just the beginning. By the early fifties, there were three movie palaces in Zanzibar City, three more on the neighboring island of Pemba. And dozens on the Tanganyikan mainland, many of them arguably the most luxurious and high tech places the audience had ever seen. At a time when most people did not have electricity. I mean, these places had fans and they had air conditioning systems. They had sound. Actually, the Royal had sound within like six months of it being unleashed elsewhere in the world. All of which might partly explain the madhouse outside these cinemas every weekend. I mean, people would line up and literally fight to get a place in the ticket line to get tickets. Demand was so intense in Zanzibar and in Dar es Salaam on the mainland that on Sundays there was a black market for cinema tickets. I talked to a number of people who earned their entire living, built their homes, you know, fed their children, put new roofs on their house by selling basically black market cinema tickets, because demand was so intense. But Laura says many didn't come just for the air conditioning. Or even just to see the movies. They also came because it was their chance to be part of their own society. It was the colonial era and both Zanzibar and mainland Tanganyika were under British control, officially all across the continent in some places, more so than others, Africans were not supposed to be in town. So these buildings were also critically important in terms of providing a space and providing an opportunity, for people to come to the city centers and claim it as their own. It wasn't just a European space. It was some place where Africans, too, were welcomed and encouraged to come down and mix with the entire town's population and have a good time. Actually, you could argue the Majestic even looked like a mix of the entire population. The theater was designed by a Brit in a quote unquote"Imperial style" that took design cues from British colonies. Dome shapes from the Middle East to arches from India, all of which happened to be cultures that had been mashing up with African culture in Zanzibar for centuries. Take it all together. And this wasn't just a building. It was a meeting place for all the island's races and social classes and a reflection of them. And when the society changed politically, sure enough, the Majestic changed too.<i>Mister...</i><i>I wonder if to begin this program</i><i>you would give us just a quick sketch</i><i>of your country.</i><i>Well, this I've learned from this country.</i><i>It is roughly the size of Texas.</i> That is none other than Eleanor Roosevelt interviewing Julius Nyerere, Tanganyikan politician who was trying to end British colonial rule.<i>I have organized the Tanganyika</i><i>African National Union, of which I am I am president</i><i>and trying to get independence for the country.</i> In the mid-fifties, independence movements like Nyerere's swept across the continent, trying to forge a new Africa. And at the same time, almost providentially, the Majestic also had to start anew. The building was undergoing renovations in 1954, a fire started, and it basically burned the building to the ground. And then it was rebuilt as the Majestic that stands there today. Today's Majestic is not the Majestic of old. This one still makes nods to the influence of foreign cultures. Like tall, narrow windows with that Indian dome shape. But the main thing that hits you about it is its long, rectangular facade. Clean lines, a spire. It feels like the kind of thing a country builds when it's looking forward to the future. It's highly modernist, right? It's a highly modernist building. I see a lot of elements of art deco, but highly modernist. And when the Majestic is rebuilt in the 1950s it's really a very exciting and important time in terms of the history of the African continent. There's a lot of movement towards pushing for independence. It's also a really exciting and innovative time in terms of the history of cinema. And so there are a whole host of new technologies that are taking off, surround sound, wide-angle screenings. The new Majestic had all that modern gadgetry and a devoted audience with tastes more modern and cosmopolitan than most. They showed movies from all over the world, actually Tanzania had a far richer cinematic tradition and a much wider access to global cinema than, the United States was horrible in this regard, as you probably know. Tanzania had access to the latest Hollywood films, but they also had films from Europe. They had films from Iran. But Indian films were by far the most popular films in the region, and those were the ones that filled the theaters to overflowing on the weekends. Like what? What were the hits for the audience at that time? Oh, Awaara one that was huge in the 1950s... Mughal-e-Azam was huge. Anarkali was huge. There were a zillion of them. There were a zillion. You know, if there was a hot new movie coming, you know Mughal-e-Azam was coming or there was going to be a re-show of Awaara, people would hire a whole bus and the whole village would make, you know, an incredibly long journey at the time, the roads were really bad. It might take you, I don't know, three or four hours to go from a village into town. And then you watch a film that's three hours long. I would hate to have been there for a time when they finally got to the theater and the movie wasn't really all that good. Today, The Majestic still screens Indian movies. But that's where the similarities end. My name is Martin Mhando I am the festival director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Martin Mhando has spent a lot of time at the Majestic. He's actually the guy who gave Nick Broomfield that tour of the place. And he tells me about the evening screenings at the cinema these days. Beneath a roof so full of holes you can sometimes see the stars. There's an old fellow there whose family has been running the building for many, many years. He's called Abdul. And Abdul has a passion for cinema. And he has been able to maintain a very old, a small projector. Basically, what he does is he connects a DVD player to this projector. And he projects old Indian movies and currently the only people who really come to watch are elderly people, basically these are people who are nostalgic about cinema going. So they come there every evening,

every evening after 6:30 or 7: 16:30

00, Abdul pulls up his projector, puts up a DVD and they watch a film. And it's not many people who come in. There's hardly more than six, I think. I've never been able to see more than ten people in that building. Right now these are the only regular public screenings in Zanzibar. A grainy video image projected for a few people on the remains of a screen. How did it come to this? Well, like a lot about post-colonial African society, it's complicated.<i>Your Majesty, do you think you'll ever go back to Zanzibar?</i><i>I cannot it answer now.</i> That is the sultan of Zanzibar being interviewed in 1964, right after he'd been deposed by a revolution. Just a few years after the islands gained independence.<i>You've always worked hard for independence.</i><i>In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better</i><i>if you had remained a British protectorate?</i><i>Yes.</i> In the aftermath, a new government, nationalized movie theaters and Laura Fair says the decline began. What that meant was theater owners were allowed to continue to run their businesses, but they no longer owned the building. They could have their business taken away from them, and many experienced this. And when you don't own a building of that size, your willingness or ability to invest in it really diminishes. The palaces started falling apart. Then in the eighties, in exchange for loans from the International Monetary Fund, Tanzania's government was forced to cut off subsidies for lots of industries. Entertainment and film was one of them. And when that was done, basically what happened is the price of the cinema going ticket grew by over 100%, and we had calculated that if the cinema ticket rose to above $2, people would basically stopped going to the movies and that's what happened. Instead, folks stayed home and watch movies cheaply on these new contraptions called VHS video players. Cinemas just couldn't compete. And therefore people just hired them out to whoever is able to utilize them in the best way possible. So quite a number of them were turned into like supermarkets, but some of them even turned into churches. Large spaces, taking in 500, 600, 700 people. It makes for a really good church. The lone holdout, Abdul and the Majestic. Today to subsidize his evening screenings his family runs a restaurant out of the back of the theater. But Martin says the situation can't last. The building itself is still pretty strong. But the problem is the roof. Literally every year when there are rains, I fear that we'll wake up one day and we find the roof has caved in. Once the roof goes rain will come in and the building will go. Martin doesn't want that to happen, so he's been pushing a plan to renovate the Majestic and make it a combination movie theater and cultural center. He's put together a group of nonprofits to lease the building from the government. And after what sounds like a long slog through bureaucracy, he says that deal's been approved. Now they've just got to figure out how much cash they need to raise for the renovation. At this moment now, we are doing the feasibility study to understand the cost of the actual work that needs to be done in the building and also agreeing as to the eventual use of that building. Martin's got a lot of ideas about how he'd like it used. As a workshop space to train East African filmmakers, event space for community weddings and of course, the movie screenings to attract everyone. Basically, in the middle of a city that caters more and more to tourists and leaves out locals, he wants the new Majestic to be like the old one. A place for the whole society. One of the things that actually characterized what we've always called the cosmopolitan nature of Zanzibar is the cinema going culture. People from all walks of life, from the Sultan to the ex-slaves all would walk into that cinema and enjoy that cinema, together. I mean, that is a symbol of what that nation is now, one nation under the sky. And I know it's going to be a costly activity to get it back into shape. But I will push all my ancestors powers to help me stay alive to see the Majestic back into action. But consider this I first learned about the Majestic from an article in The Guardian newspaper all about this campaign to restore the theater. It was written over 11 years ago. The Majestic's still in ruins. So I guess I could leave you with this cautionary takeaway, that once a place starts to lose its cinemas, it can be really hard to bring even one of them back from the brink. Even with someone as dedicated as this guy on the case Do you know what? We're not ending the season on that note. The hopeful way to think about the movie-going future from a place 6000 miles from Zanzibar City. Coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them hand-picked by real people who really know movies. And with a new film debuting on the platform every single day, there's always something new to discover. So on this season of the podcast, we have been talking about history making movie theaters. Hopefully that's inspired you to love and support your local cinema that much more, especially this episode. And we've got a new thing going that can help you do exactly that. It is called MUBI Go. And when you sign up, you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters. Previous picks include award winning films like Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, Cha-Cha Real Smooth and the Power of the Dog. MUBI Go is now available in the UK, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and it is coming to more U.S. cities soon. To learn more, check out MUBI.com/Go And finally, after you finish listening today, you can stream some of the films we have featured on this podcast. All you got to do is head to MUBI.com Subscribe and look for the collection called Featured On the MUBI Podcast. It's on the Now Showing page. As always, you will find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which... Back to it. So last fall I started putting together this season of the show, which obviously celebrates cinema. It was during the latter days of COVID lockdowns, which was, of course, a terrible time for cinemas. Another economic closure is hitting movie goers, The Arclight theaters, including the iconic Pacific Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, will close for good. I mean, for decades, I've watched theaters struggle and sometimes close. But suddenly in my city of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, movie capital of the world, it seemed like a few winked out of existence every day. Including some that were practically symbols of the city. The Dome was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but it also provided space for independent films. So in the middle of it all, I turn for solace to a city that'll come as no surprise to anyone who listened to the last season of this show. Amsterdam, my favorite town. No, I didn't travel there. Pandemic, remember? But I did speak to a longtime local and kind of a legendary guy in the cinema scene there. My name is Jeffrey Babcock, and I live in Amsterdam and I call myself a cultural activist. You'll get an idea of what that means in a minute. But first, his cinephile backstory. He went to high school in Madison, Wisconsin, circa 1980, and started haunting student screenings at the university. And these were film freaks, you know, they'd be showing European cinema and Japanese cinema, Kurosawa film or Truffaut's, you know, Stolen Kisses, then also a Cassavetes film or something like that. And they would be showing all these movies on the weekends. And I took it as totally, natural. And I thought, "Wow, this is fantastic." And then later, like just recently, I think it was a Film Comment or something, I saw an article and they said,"Well, you know, back in 1980, the two best places to watch films were Paris and Madison, Wisconsin." And I thought every university was just like that. But apparently it was really exceptional. Later, Jeffrey went to film school, studying under the great experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. And finally, he jetted off to Europe, where he thought he'd be, you know, a filmmaker. And I was making films with a friend of mine. But then at one point, we stopped making films because the business was getting in a way too tough. And I had to think about what do I want to do? And I thought, "Well, actually, we don't need more films." I mean, of course we can always use more good films because. Yeah, of course. But there are so many films being made these days. I felt we don't need more cinema, we need more cinemas. We needed places to watch the films. Specifically, certain kinds of places. Because it's not that Amsterdam didn't have cinemas. It's just at the time, this was the early 2000s, Jeffrey says many were being gobbled up by Frances Pathé theater chain, and he wasn't a fan of the blockbuster programing or the ads before the movies or the impersonality of the places. Everything started going in that direction. I thought, "Well, there's all this history of cinema and we have to have a place where people can be exposed to that in some kind of way." And there was a danger of cinema and the cinema experience being commercialized too much. And I was believing more in community. And so I was like, okay, I started building alternative cinemas. Or rather, and here's the part where I start taking solace. He started building a network of places he could temporarily turn into cinemas. I decided that I didn't want to have one cinema, that I wanted to have about, you know, ten locations or something, and I could move around all week. So it's kind of a nomad cinema. Because when you have those different kinds of locations, a lot of different kind of people end up in spaces that they normally wouldn't end up in. For example, I've shown movies in a nuclear war bunker in the Vondelpark here in Amsterdam. I do it in abandoned buildings and warehouses. I had one cinema about seven years ago, and that was inside the oldest bridge in Amsterdam. I mean, from the outside, I could never have imagined that it would be possible to have a cinema inside a bridge but it had a staircase going down, and then this kind of old, thick wooden door that opened up. And you could go inside and there was room enough for a cinema.- It was fantastic.- What film did you show? It was The Devils by Ken Russell.<i>Every time there's a so-called nationalist revival, it means one thing.</i><i>Somebody is trying to seize control of the entire country.</i> Why did you pick that? Because there's a lot going on there. Well, it's a Ken Russell film. So, yeah. I'm surprised that it wasn't a bridge themed, you know, Bridge over the River Kwai.- Yeah.- A Bridge Too Far, might have been a good one. I mean, it's even got a Dutch location. As you might imagine, these are not deluxe cinema going experiences. In fact, Jeffrey's setup isn't that much different than Abdul's at the Majestic. He usually uses a portable digital projector, occasionally 16mm. Sometimes he sets up a homemade screen made of wood and paper. There's rarely more than 50 seats. And the admission price, when there is one, is humble to match. So cheap that anybody can afford it. Less than a beer. So... And the other ones are for free. But the cheap tickets and shifting locales bring in an audience almost as diverse as in the Majestic's heyday. And Jeffrey says, the experience that audience has is just as transporting. So now we have all these very different people from all these very different backgrounds, and they're in this space together. And they're dreaming together. And that's what's important about cinema for me. When you're watching a movie, you're being absorbed into the narrative of the movie, of course, into the reality of the movie. But you're also kind of half aware or partly aware that you're in a cinema with other people. Because people will laugh or people will knock a beer bottle over. I don't know what, but you know that you're sitting with other people, so you're kind of like navigating this kind of in-between world between these two different realities. And I think that's kind of a twilight world that's very beautiful. We're on this trip together, you know, and people feel that. So here's what I'll leave you with. If you're worried about the state of cinemas. Almost none of the theaters we visited this season were grand. The ones that were, we're actually pretty beat up. But what they were all really good at was creating that space between worlds where strangers could dream in the dark together, wherever that happens. It's a great cinema. And it can be anywhere. And that's the MUBI podcast for this season. It has been my honor telling the stories of these cinemas. Follow us to make sure you don't miss season three coming later this year. Expect more great stories about the movie universe. If you loved the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, it helps others find and love us too. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or you just want to wax nostalgic about your own dearly departed cinema, we are here for you. Our email is podcast@mubi.com This episode was hosted, written and edited by me Rico Gagliano. Beth Schiff is our booking producer. Steven Colón mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed our amazing original music. Thanks this week to Berend Van Der Lans, Iga Perzyna, Jackson Musker and everyone at MUBI who helped make this season happen. The show is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea Efe Cakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca for MUBI. Speaking of which, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we've talked about on this very podcast, just head over MUBI.com to start watching. Enjoy what's left of your summer, and P.S... It looks like the Cinerama Dome is going to reopen. You see, there's always hope.