History of Tinker Street Cinema

Series Summary

Since the first photographers worked with fervor to make daguerreotypes of the uncivilized American West, capturing the genius of both the landscape and its people, we have been ensnared by the beauty, irreverence, slander, chaos, and wonder of images born from the marriage of silver-bromide and light. The method of camera obscura taught us how to look at things afresh, how to use changing perspectives and foci to decipher the lives and events of the people around us. And since we discovered how to unlock the secrets of capturing motion on film, our world has never been the same.

Moving pictures, silent films, the cinema, movies: these are all names for one of the most important modern art mediums in the history of human existence. A great story’s best qualities—its depth of meaning, clarity (or ambiguity) of message, its bold, invigorated themes, its tragic, heroic, supernatural characters—all of these elements leap off of the page and come to life on the silver screen. Suddenly, the theater of the imagination becomes a living drama, a realization of the exact ideas of the creator. Suddenly, a man or woman with an important idea has another truly powerful method to communicate that idea to the world.

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Nancy Adler and on behalf of Expert Village, today I am going to teach you tell you how to operate a movie cinema. Here we are inside the Tinker Street Cinema in Woodstock, New York. We are a unique cinema. We are the only movie theater in town and we have only one screen which is fairly unusual for these days where everyone has a multiplex. This building used to be a Methodist Church but in the late 60's when everyone was losing the number of their congregations, the churches grouped together and moved down the road to a larger church and sold this building to a man who built the theater and he ran it for about 6 years and then we came along and purchased the Cinema. We are primarily an art theater and we play usually independent films and foreign films. We have a film festival every year which is packed for 4 days and we usually hold a movie for only 1 week but our record was an English patient which ran for 8 weeks and people in town became so annoyed that we were still holding the film that they started writing letters to the newspaper complaining are we ever going to change the film, so people are very involved, the people in town. I think the Cinema is very important to them because it is a big source of entertainment around here. There is not a lot to do. "