“This has got to work”
Between puffs of a desperate cigarette on a blustering Sunday night in August, Rob Denmam just keeps saying to me “It’s got to work. It just has to.”
We’re talking about bringing celluloid back to Perth with the Revival House Theatre, a phoenix rising from the ashes of Como’s historic Como Theatre, also known as the Cygnet Cinema. The art deco theatre is now exclusively screening retrospective films only on 35mm or 16mm prints, just like all theatres used to before the turn of the millennium. It’s an ambitious gamble, one with little profit in sight, but done entirely for the love of the old ways of moviegoing.
Located at 16 Preston Street in Como is the Como Theatre, opened in 1938 and the first purpose-built sound cinema in Western Australia. It’s art deco style, designed by architect William Leighton, is instantly iconic to many Perth city residents, but it almost faded entirely from memory.
The Como Theatre has been listed on the Western Australian State Registry since 1995, and the license was previously granted to the Grand Cinemas line for a number of years. Due to impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, Grand Cinemas went into administration and sold its Western Australian locations to Hoyts and Reading.
But the Como was not included in these deals.
“The cinema was not doing well. Even before COVID and the 2021 shutdown, the cinema just wasn’t looked after. We had a lot of work ahead of us. But the property developers who own it now have really believed in this place to get it back to where it should be.” Rob and his team feel the full support of the private owners as they take on this endeavour, but it could have very nearly suffered the same fate as many of Perth’s best cinemas over the years.
The history of Perth's dwindling cinemas is not a new one. While The Piccadilly Theatre is a fellow art deco venue which has long been suggested will experience a rebirth as a live performance venue, over the years we’ve also had an IMAX theatre transformed into a wedding dress shop, the Liberty Theatre on Barrack Street occasionally revived as a festival venue, and the sound of popcorn is but a distant memory for Cinema Paradiso in Northbridge which is now remembered as being ‘the cinema across the street from a nightclub.’
In August 2024, it came to light that Perth’s other still-operating art deco theatre, the Windsor, in Nedlands is going up for sale, lacking the Heritage Listing protection that the Como Theatre is afforded.
Back on the pavement of Preston Street where you’ll find an ode to cinema in the form of a statue of film canisters and a film reel, The Revival House manager Rob Denmam doesn’t let any of this reality of our city stop him and head projectionist Satria Leech from making their dreams come true. Dreams that are only quite recent to be fair.
Mr. Denmam started his career in entertainment with a role in the record industry and was involved in successfully converting Perth’s Astor Theatre into a live music venue, something he hopes to do with the Revival House in the future. “We’ve got ideas about doing music, community theatre, live comedy.
“But film is the priority right now.”
So how did Rob Denmam get around to this whole business of projecting films? It’s a bit of a ‘met a guy who knew a guy’ story, but Mr. Denmam ran the Jaffa Room here in Perth, and met Satria, or “Sat”, there. They bonded over a love of old film, and Sat has his own connection to this world.
“My day job is managing and looking after all cinema projectors in the South Perth area,” something I personally thought was impossible, but then again these are digital projectors. “It’s basically plug and play, which is still good. But there’s something missing.” Now that’s something I couldn’t agree more with.
Over our four-hour hangout on that cold Sunday night three months ago, Rob, Sat, and myself just chat about everything to do with the beauty of celluloid prints, the history of digital projection, and the pros and cons of film versus digital. They show me a single frame of a nitrate print for a movie we assume to be from the 1930s or earlier, but it’s too hard to tell.
Feeling film in your hands, smelling its unique chemical scent, and hearing it flickering through a projector is an unmatched experience.
“You’re watching the illusion of movement. You’re seeing still images flashing at 24-frames per second. You’re seeing the colours as they’re meant to be seen, the grain, a proper cinematic experience,” muses Sat, paraphrasing Quentin Tarantino. Sat is an unassuming bloke, friendly and bright but with an endless energy and strength loading enormous platters of film one after the other non-stop.
Rob is a bit more weathered, definitely stretching himself a bit thin for this idea of reviving celluloid in Perth. “I’m not making any money from this. Everything we get from the patrons goes back into renting prints, keeping up costs for the theatre. We won’t be making a profit for a while.”
He also expresses frustration at where Australia is at with its existing film prints. We discuss how many of the prints the Revival Theatre shows come from private collectors and independent libraries, but many of the best are hidden behind too much red tape. “Instead of in America where the prints are basically free, we have the National Film and Sound Archive which have made their rental prices twice as expensive, their prints aren’t always the best quality, and the courier costs are too much on top of all that.”
In our discussion, Rob confesses that this is all because celluloid is becoming more and more in vogue, partially due to the critical and financial success of the IMAX-shot Oppenheimer. He keeps in touch with American personnel running drive-ins and retrospective theatres who say that film is more popular now than it’s been in 20 years. The time is right.
Since the opening of the Revival Theatre during the 2024 Strange Festival’s Exhumed Cinema program in June, the theatre has shown an eclectic range of classics, audience favourites, cult hits, and films you wouldn’t expect to have surviving prints. Personally, I have seen James Cameron’s True Lies, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, The Dark Knight, Buster Keaton’s The General, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Interstella 5555, all of which has been an experience like no other, but for my money is not enough.
I need more.
The effect of stepping into the Como theatre foyer, and then the grand auditorium, is one of blissful intoxication. You are entering one of Perth’s oldest surviving movie theatres, a testament to a bygone era of cinemagoing, complete with old movie posters and promo items. The chairs aren’t originals, having been donated by a local church, but it doesn’t matter. The walls and ceiling are decorated in perfect art deco style that feels totally lost on new cinema developments.
And then the projector whirls up.
Before you get to see your chosen retrospective delight, you are treated to an idiosyncratic pre-show mix of bizarre trailers and risqué advertisements, naturally, all on film too. I’ve seen old ads for Coca-Cola, Tooheys, Mentos, the Sega Genesis, Nutri-Grain, the 1995 Rugby League Winfield Cup promo with Tina Turner, and trailers for everything from 1998’s Godzilla to Thomas and the Magic Railroad.
It's a whole show, really. A time capsule to when going to the movies was a blast from start to finish, when the pre-show ads and trailers were cinematic experiences themselves, ones you wouldn’t normally see on TV. Where scratches on the film, focus issues, and delicate sound mixes are all part of the fun.
I mention as much to Rob and Sat, that when I saw True Lies it actually looked brighter and sharper than I’d ever seen it. Sat is quick to divulge a secret about the theatre. “Everything we show is a bit brighter because we’re using a proper silver screen. It’s painted silver, sure, but uses aluminium flakes that direct the light to wherever you’re sitting.”
It’s quite something to see a film like True Lies with all of its film grain and chemical saturation, far from any AI-generated tampering that digital releases suffer from now (see the re-release of Interstella 5555 for an example of this at work). Sat muses again on this matter “[with our theatre] there’s no brightness, contrast, colour control. It’s a raw white light and a bit of film. That’s it."
As mentioned, Rob has plans to push the Revival House further. Their selection of films over the last four months has been unique to say the least, but they’re getting into a groove now, figuring out the best days and times to show films that have in-built audiences, while still making time for the cult classics. This past weekend the theatre showed a marathon of the theatrical prints for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Saturday session sold-out completely, forcing the theatre to refurbish their balcony seating which was previously only used for storage. But is a great day like this enough?
“It’s just about getting the word out there,” Sat tells me quite honestly. “It’s about convincing people to come and see a technology that entertained others for over 100 years,”
“Put the screen down and watch something that’s fresh and raw.”
Rob shares the same mindset but remains wonderfully optimistic. “I think we can bring it all back. The rest of the world is going nuts for film. Perth, we’ve got our hardcore followers, but it’s like records. People have nostalgia, sure, but if you’re into records then you’re into film. It’s an aesthetic. It’s real.”
It’s fresh, it’s raw, it’s real. The word is spreading. Rob tells me that many of the people he talks to who come here say they’ve never seen the films they’re showing, but come anyway because they know deep down this is the best way to have such a first impression.
So what’s next? The theatre is gearing up for the whole of December to be dominated by Christmas movies, like a Gremlins double-feature, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang among others. Next year should be starting with a Harry Potter film marathon which is simply smart programming for the joining Venn diagram of Potterheads and fans of celluloid.
But the priority for the next two weeks is Studio Ghibli, kicking off from 21 November 2024 to 8 December 2024. The Revival House will screen 15 films from the monumental and game-changing Japanese studio, all on film and all in the original Japanese language with English subtitles. This program is sure to be The Revival House’s next big hit.
“This has to work. It just has to.” Rob Denmam’s words echo to me, as we stood outside the second-floor emergency exit, welcoming the cold air that Sunday night. And my response to him then is what I still believe today, “It will”.