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The Metropolitan Theatre, 1959

If thinking of his documentary-in-the-making as an "impressionistic portrait… a social archaeology" seems a bit top-heavy, Kenneth George Godwin can put it more simply.
   
"Basically, it’s about people’s moviegoing memories, and the rise and fall of movie theatres in Winnipeg," says Godwin, who’s currently in the editing stages on his as-yet untitled-project for MTS Winnipeg Video on Demand, which is slated to be completed in 2012.
   
A film editor by trade, Godwin has long worked on various documentary productions for the National Film Board, including the films Unspeakable and The Gypsies of Svinia, by Winnipeg documentarian John Paskievich.
   
What Godwin promises is a film that justly captures the density and richness of the experience of moviegoing in the Winnipeg of old.
   
It’s meant to provide context at a time when the cinema, like everything else in the world, is rapidly going topsy-turvy. And it’s full of the kind of eyebrow-raising revelations that good historical research can so cheerfully supply.
   
For example: Winnipeg really was one of the premiere exhibition centres in North America when Godwin first moved here from Newfoundland in the early ’70s.
   
"Just about anything released played here, and every neighbourhood had its own movie theatre," he says.
   
It’s true, too. At the time there were more theatres downtown than you could count on both hands, and far more available screens.
   
"There was infinite variety and choice," Godwin continues.
   
The Park Theatre on Osborne, for instance, was almost totally devoted to foreign films. There was also more turnover, with more movies in total blowing through town.
   
"Distribution patterns shifted massively after the ’70s," Godwin explains. That’s when many freestanding theatres were closed down to be replaced by giant multiplexes — all showing the same features.
   
Yet the local history of cinema’s past remains all around us, in the form of not only the Park, but also the former King’s Theatre on Portage Avenue in St. James.
   
One major element of Godwin’s project-in-progress is to provide an exhaustive overview of the city’s various theatres, using both archival material and collective memory.
   
What’s contrasted is the very experience of moviegoing between then and now. Some changes were simply inevitable:
   
"Before home video, people just went to the movies more then," Godwin says.
   
The biggest loss he sees is that of filmgoing as ritual.
   
"Back then, you had to see movies in the theatre, so their impact was very different," Godwin says. "Now it’s like watching a home video on a big screen. People are made captive audiences of advertisements, and the movie itself just becomes another part of the ‘stuff’ being projected."
   
It’s perhaps hard for Godwin to maintain critical distance when he’s such a film lover himself. But many of his observations would seem to get at deeper, more systemic problems with how films are even made now.
   
"As a culture, we’re losing the sense of narrative — the idea that a story is a contained entity with a point of view that can convey something," he says. "The Internet, franchisement, things like that make movies much more fragmented."
   
So it’s not just false nostalgia to say that cinema in Winnipeg is not what it used to be.

Winnipeg at the movies
Coming to MTS Winnipeg Video on Demand