Dave Harte

Dave is a Wonderland Volunteer Researcher.

Why Wonderland?

I’m an academic at Birmingham City University. Cinema isn’t a research focus of mine but it is a passion. Or rather, I have a passion for what cinema-going has meant to me throughout my life - from seeing 70s classics in grand suburban palaces (Jaws at the Beaufort) to art house films at The Triangle. I obsess a bit about old Birmingham cinemas, looking up what their final films were and what happened to the buildings afterwards. My interest in the project is in hearing other people’s memories of their cinema-going but with a focus on suburban cinemas in their later years as they struggled to survive and sliced up their large auditoriums in order to compete with the emerging multiplexes. My local cinema, The Capitol, drifted to something of a flea pit as it struggled to make ends meet and had to wait weeks to get the big movies after they’d had their city centre run. Yet at times its programming was quirky enough to show both The Warriors and Crimes of Passion within a few weeks of each other in 1984. I‘m interested in whether people loved their local cinema (as I did) during the years they were generally unloved.

What's your dream cinema (in ten words or less!)

Triangle Cinema, Gosta Green: art house + classics + retrospectives = my dream cinema.