On the ballast of the image: Cinema and the construction of public space in Cape Town, South Africaof the image: The cinema and the making of public space in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

The urban planning of Cape Town, South Africa, as well as the racial segregation policies that guided it, informed the construction of cinemas in the central district and the area informally known as “Cinemaland”, where racially restricted and elite cinemas were concentrated. This article addresses the segregation of leisure through the construction and demolition of the Cinema Alhambra, also known as “Mother Theatre”, as a lens for the transformations of the city center in the early 20th century and in the relationship of the city with the coast and the access of pedestrians to the sea. The article identifies three key moments that influenced these multiple configurations between cinema audiences, the sea, and the city, and how these were fundamental in the articulation of competing aesthetic projects in the reformulation of the urban public space. The article suggests that cinema offers an important lens for the city’s maritime connections and the construction of the coastline and the pier, at first, through the importation of European films and the identification of cinema with its imperial commercial ties. In a second moment, from the 1930s, the city underwent transformations in its “cinemascapes” that renounced the sea and turned inland, breaking symbolic metropolitan ties, and justifying violent removals of black neighborhoods in the center with the inauguration of a “civic center” of Afrikaner nationalism. Finally, the demolition of the Alhambra and construction of a national theatre demonstrates how cinemas participated in the imagination of a national audience and a racial topography that to this day inform Cape Town’s nostalgia for the cinema.