Category: Week 3

Introduction:

The Campus Theatre is a unique experience that tends to surprise those who enter into its doors for the first time.  As commercial films continue to fill the screens of multiplexes that are ubiquitous to American communities, it becomes tougher and tougher to see anything that was produced outside of a Hollywood studio while  “going out to the movies.”

What the Campus Theatre has offered patrons in recent years is something different.

People who have found themselves overcome by their own curiosity and susceptible to the gravitational pull of the building situated at 413 Market Street will tell you that the first thing that strikes them is the facade of the building. The vintage looking marquee gives the illusion that the theatre is stuck in the era in which it was built but upon stepping inside one can see that it is actually a capsule of modernity. The beautiful images that line the walls and ceiling of the interior of the theatre are only overshadowed by the images projected onto the singular screen in the auditorium.

Over the course of any given week, one may have a chance to see a number of classic, contemporary or even unheard of films. With the curatorial standard of the Campus Theatre being on such a high level, one can always be sure that whatever screens within the Campus Theatre will be quality.

Significance:

These are only a few of the many reasons by which The Campus Theatre has been selected as the subject of research. It may come as no surprise that single-screen art deco theaters across the country are going out of business for a number of reasons with one of the main ones being the emergence of digital film streaming platforms. What the Campus Theatre offers is a space for individuals to congregate, appreciate film exhibition of the highest standard and to socialize. These things that are afforded by the Campus Theatre cannot be found in many other places.

This project aims to raise awareness of and to commemorate the Campus Theatre and its mission to “present programming that includes the screening of art, classic and modern films, live performance, and enhanced film programming experiences, all steeped in the rich atmosphere of the authentic Art Deco, single-screen American theatre experience.” To this end, the project  presents a comprehensive historical context through which one may view the Campus Theatre and gain a better understanding of how it has transformed over the past seven decades.

Media Representation is significant for people’s view of the world and of themselves. Television, movies and social media have become some of the most prevalent ways that people can view events around them. People interact with media daily, but films and television shows seem to be the most viewed platforms. There’s one caveat: most of the content in movies and television are narrative stories. These narrative stories portray different versions of reality or try to emulate actual issues faced in this reality. Some of those issues are extremely serious, like mental illness. Films have a long history of portraying mental illness, but as an artform that can be expressive sometimes the portrayal of illnesses are not completely accurate. In fact, there seems to be a trend “that renditions of mental illness in film represent another type of despair; a malaise, anxiety, post-war trauma sense of difference and otherness” (Packer, Mental Illness in Popular Culture). Many filmmakers use mental illness concepts to have appealing stories, but do these portrayals accurately show and describe the reality of these conditions?

I’m going to challenge that representation of mental illness isn’t always accurately portrayed because of the statistics that surround mental health. There are many portrayals of people that deal with illness and disorders, but most of those portrayals are not accurate, in that they do not agree with the statistics. Mental illness is a diverse concept that can affect people from many different backgrounds, yet most of the portrayals in media “most characters living with it are male, young or middle-aged, Caucasian, and with, at least, a middle-class income” which gives us “fewer opportunities to observe, imagine and question how living in poverty, being a woman, aging, and/or suffering from racial or ethnic prejudice further complicate the already complex universe of mental illness”(Friedrich, The Literary and Linguistic Construction of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: No Ordinary Doubt). I observe films from recent years that have mental illness incorporated into the plot to show that media, specifically films don’t have completely accurate or diverse portrayals of the illness they are trying to simulate.