Life AMID THE WRECKAGE, ONE CINEMA SHINES
The Labia in Cape Town was always different, and now that’s paying off
ý Tucked away in the Cape Town suburb of Gardens, the Labia cinema has endured a rollercoaster six months since reopening after the worst of the Covid crisis.
“It’s been up and down,” says owner Ludi Kraus. “Things started with promise when we reopened in August, then the second wave hit and business dropped. The curfew wasn’t great, but in the past 10 days things have improved with the curfew being relaxed.”
Cinemas across the world are struggling. Screens have been dark in the US, while releases have been postponed in Europe and Hollywood.
For the Labia, Kraus says having the alcohol ban eased has been good for trade. Patrons can now sip one of the cinema’s famous slush cocktails on the terrace (maintaining social distancing, of course), while pecking at popcorn from the vintage popcorn maker.
“Some people don’t even know we’ve reopened,” he says. “But we’ve arranged things carefully to maintain Covid protocols. Each of our four cinemas has a staggered opening time — 15 minutes after each other — and masks have to be worn in the cinema and social distancing rules obeyed. We have 10 sanitising stations. If anything, we’re erring on the side of caution. We’re encouraging people to book online and have introduced a pay-per-view streaming service.”
As far as the programme is concerned, Kraus says it changes almost daily — one of the repertory cinema’s advantages. He compares this planning to doing a crossword because it’s an “educated guess” what films will be winners, particularly as younger audiences have been the cinema’s most enthusiastic supporters in recent months.
“Made in Italy with Liam Neeson was a hit here, somehow Tuscany always strikes a nerve with our audiences; as was Tenet, a blockbuster with brains.
Promising Young Woman has also been popular,” he says.
Kraus’s love of cinema and his deep institutional knowledge means that films with potentially small audiences — such as Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love — are frequently shown alongside films with wider appeal. Grand Budapest Hotel ran for a full year at the Labia, and
Bohemian Rhapsody ran for six months, earning the cinema an award as the venue at which the film ran longest anywhere in SA.
Shown as part of the Labia’s reopening programme last August, Words of Love is a portrait of the late Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and his muse, Marianne Ihlen, made by Nick Broomfield. Some might remember Broomfield’s documentary about Eugene Terre’Blanche during the dying days of apartheid. More recently he has made acclaimed films about Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur.
Kraus says Pixar’s animated film Soul is pulling in younger audiences as the Labia’s four cinemas, now running at less than half of capacity, try to fill more seats. Soon there will be the added attraction of a mug of the Labia’s winter glühwein.
Casual opulence
As the oldest repertory cinema in the country, the Labia has had its fair share of makeovers, changes of direction and scrutiny from the censors.
Opened by Princess Labia in May 1949, it was originally the ballroom for the Italian embassy next door, before being used as a theatre for live performances in the 1950s and 1960s. This casual opulence can still be seen today in the plush velvet seats, the Art Deco lamps that line the walls and the sumptuous wood panelling.
The playwright Robert Kirby opened many of his anti-apartheid satires at the Labia in the 1970s, and through the following decade the Labia slowly transformed into a repertory cinema showing arthouse classics, neglected films and erotica — all under the beady eye of the apartheid censors.
When Kraus wanted to screen the banned Last Tango in Paris, the censors would agree only to a sixweek run and set the condition that the film be introduced by an
“eminent person”. One name forwarded to the censors by Kraus was rejected, so, with the help of notes from film critic Barry Ronge, he introduced the film himself. “It was nerve-racking,” he says. “I was relying on notes I didn’t fully understand.”
Kraus, who has been sole proprietor of the Labia since 1989, comes from a family of film enthusiasts. His father, Martin, a representative for Rex Trueform suits in the then South West Africa, came home one day and announced out of the blue that he was going to build one of Windhoek’s first cinemas, the Alhambra.
“At one stage my dad tried to persuade his business partner to build a drive-in but that didn’t happen,” says Kraus. “The Alhambra was designed by an architect who had little experience of designing cinemas, and some films fell off trucks and trains, but it ended up being a special place, managed by a Dutch head waiter whom my father persuaded to come and work for him.”
Klaus arrived in Cape Town from Windhoek to study law at the University of Cape Town in 1972 and later served his articles in Windhoek. Though he practised as an attorney in Cape Town until 1989, the film bug and the Alhambra magic nibbled away in his mind.
Finally passion trumped good sense. He figured he’d be happier bringing films such as Last Tango in Paris and One Deadly Summer to Cape Town audiences and a repertory cinema — where films alternate from night to night — seemed to be the perfect vehicle.
Part cinema, part shrine
The wobble of the lockdown aside, Kraus says that audiences at the Labia have “increased hugely” in the past five or six years — a counterintuitive trend in these Netflixand HBO-obsessed times.
He puts this down to several factors, most important of which has been the Labia’s conversion to digital and the fact that the venue has struck a chord with young audiences keen to see alternative films. “Young people are also getting tired of white shiny tiles and marble in the malls,” says Kraus. “That’s why they’re coming here.”
One of Kraus’s triumphs was his championing of Bird on a Wire, the “lost” Tony Palmer documentary about Cohen.
The film, which was shot as Cohen reluctantly toured Europe and Israel in 1972 hoping to boost a stalled career, secured a partial release two years later but sank from view for 30 years. Then “Tony found the reels in a dusty Hollywood storeroom”, according to Kraus.
Kraus, a lifelong Cohen fan, heard about the restored version and invited Palmer to Cape Town to attend a limited screening of the documentary at the Labia.
“Suddenly I got very worried: ‘What if no-one decides to come?’ Tony was coming and I could only think: ‘What have I done?’”
As it happened, the screenings were a huge success.
Cohen fans emerged out of every nook and cranny, and for a couple of heady days the Labia became part cinema, part shrine.
“Those days were some of the most magical moments we’ve ever had here,” he says.