Cinematic Displacement: Examining Denver's Local Film Culture

by Josiah Hesse

You will find me in the matinée,

the dark of the matinée

It’s better in the matinée,

the dark of the matinée is mine

— Franz Ferdinand

Throughout the 2000s, I trusted the Starz Film Center so completely, I would show up and simply ask for a ticket for whatever was playing next. Without so much as glancing at the poster, I’d walk into the theater knowing I wouldn’t be disappointed.

In those days, there was no shortage of dealers offering me a cinematic fix in Denver, with local programmers hosting festive events built around cult, artsy, or classic films. If I’d already watched what Starz was screening, I could still catch the free (and brilliantly curated) film series at the Central Library, followed by the Midnight Matinee at the Esquire Theater, or whatever was playing at Chez Artiste.

These were my churches, the audience my fellow congregants, and I don’t know how I’d have made it as a young artist without them.

Sadly, though, Starz closed ages ago (I attended their final screening in 2011, a 35mm print of The Big Chill). The Central library canceled their film series a few years after that. In 2024 the Chez Artiste closed, followed by the Esquire the following year, leaving Denver without a midnight film series (and leaving sexually ambiguous goth kids without the essential community support of a regular Rocky Horror Picture Show screening).

And since the corporate chain theaters offer only the same homogenized programming throughout the country, turning theaters into ghost-towns of poorly functioning automated systems overseen by confused teenagers, I can’t help but wonder: Is Denver still the same movie town I discovered in 2004?

As far back as I can remember, the anxiety I lived with all day, every day, could always be soothed by the whirr of a film projector.

The state of Iowa paid a nickel for each bottle or can you recycled at the grocery store, and since movies in my small town theater were only $2, it took no more than 40 beer or pop cans fished out of the trash for me to get a ticket. Though, as my tastes matured, I found myself unsatisfied with the strictly first-run movies screened at my hometown theater.