There's something rotten in the city of Havre -- at least, there seems to be if you've followed the shenanigans surrounding the closure of two of its cinemas, both of which were shut down within a year or so of each other (you can read about Les Clubs' misfortunes
here). All of this occurred at the beginning of this decade, a period in which I was no stranger to Le Havre yet, to my regret, I never made it to a screening at L'Eden -- although I did visit the striking Volcan building which housed the cinema. The Volcan is the home of France's very first
maison de la culture, which opened in 1961 at what is now the excellent Museé Malraux, before moving on to the Volcan via the Théâtre de l'Hôtel Ville.
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| Museé Malraux |
The
maison's first site was where Jacques Rivette's legendary
Out 1 enjoyed its first public screening, and it's only right that the museum now carries the name of the man who, in launching the
maison de la culture initiative, helped make the French arts scene a lot less Paris-centric. André Malraux was appointed France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs by Charles de Gaulle, and in 1962 both men survived assassination attempts. The attempt on Malraux's life -- which nonetheless had dreadful consequences in that it resulted in the blinding of a four-year-old girl -- was carried out by the OAS, a right-wing organisation vehemently opposed to Algerian independence; in 1963, Malraux's future son-in-law Alain Resnais would make the staggering
Muriel, a film heavily informed by the Algerian War.
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| The Volcan's temporary home: la Gare du Havre-Maritime |
But I digress. The Volcan opened in 1982, with the cinema operating right from the off until January 2010, when it "temporarily" closed for renovations which were set for the following year. Promptly after this closure, the cinema was told that the keys needed to be returned for good; apparently the
fermeture was actually definitive (although the building actually did undergo a makeover, during which the Volcan set up a temporary home at one of Havre's old train stations). The reason given by the suits for the sudden winding up of L'Eden was -- wait for it -- that three security agents (!) would be required to watch over each screening. Unless they were planning to screen nothing other than workprints from the likes of Scorsese and Tarantino, why on earth would such security measures be needed? There's something very, very wrong about all of this -- the justification for L'Eden's closure seems not only completely implausible, but ill-thought-out; an Allociné
interview with the cinema's ex-directrice Ginette Dislaire makes for a most interesting read. Oh, I almost forgot to mention: a shiny new 12-screen Gaumont had opened in the city just a few months prior to the curtain coming down on L'Eden.
Website (for Le Volcan)
