Canada's smallest movie theatre of its kind is tucked away in East Vancouver
Vancouver’s reputation as Hollywood North is well-earned, with local actors starring in box-office blockbusters and critically acclaimed TV shows being filmed on our doorstep.
But the city’s love of film stretches back to the early 1900s, and a tiny theatre in East Van is paying tribute to the city’s lost cinematic history.
In fact, East Van Vodville Cinema may be Canada’s smallest movie theatre of its kind, and it’s free for fans to check out.
View this post on Instagram
“The Vodville is a hybrid installation artwork and experimental exhibition venue,” said Janet Mader and David Bynoe, artists, film special effects technicians, members of the Vancouver Hack Space community workshop, and the creators of the East Van Vodville Cinema. “It’s a scale model of Vancouver’s First Pantages theatre, a lost historic theatre on East Hastings built in 1907 and demolished in 2011.
“History is a great starting point for artmaking because anything you reference will have layers of stories that inform the work, and some will always resonate with present events. Between the mob bombing, the burlesque show raids, the campaign to save it and its eventual demolition through neglect, the Pantages has a story we wanted to help keep alive.”
Daniel Chai/Daily Hive
Daniel Chai/Daily Hive
East Van Vodville’s five-inch video screen plays local art, short films, and curated clips in a largely 3D-printed theatre, viewed through a hole in the wall of the Vancouver Hack Space building off Venables.
There’s a stump for children to stand on to view the screen, pavers for wheel-rocking visitors, and a handle for accessibility assistance.
The miniature cinema is free to the public and open for viewing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Its name pays tribute to the spelling of the Pantages “VODVIL” sign, as well as the fact that it serves up Video On Demand via a Raspberry Pi controlled player.
East Van Vodville Cinema
East Van Vodville Cinema
“We picked away on the project for about a year before the soft-launch, and we had it in public beta-testing for an additional four months,” explained Mader and Bynoe. “We realized pretty quickly that people like to share this kind of experience and that our original vision of using a door peephole, like the Peephole Cinema in San Francisco, was not going to fly.
“I think the closest similar-ish mini-theatre artwork is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Muriel Lake Incident, which you can see now at their Art Warehouse in Enderby. But we’re smaller. If anybody else has been dumb enough to try and build an outdoor, interactive, 24/7 public cinema, with active programming, they have not told the English-speaking Internet about it.”
Daniel Chai/Daily Hive
Daniel Chai/Daily Hive
Mader and Bynoe curate and show a new collection roughly every 10 to 12 days, with recent themes including owls, the female gaze, and gothic romance. Clips from Hollywood films are short enough to fall under fair dealings, so they can screen anything from 130 years of cinema.
Local creators are also invited to contact them for opportunities to screen their work in the unique Vancouver theatre.
East Van Vodville Cinema
“We love how much enjoyment people are getting from East Van Vodville Cinema,” the creators said. “Hearing the thing start up at 3 in the morning and knowing that somebody’s night is better for it gives us delight.
“If others are interested in making their own weird ideas into real things, they should check out the Hack Space. It’s a volunteer-run, grassroots makerspace with an open house on Tuesday evenings. We really couldn’t have made this happen without the support of the Hack Space community.”
East Van Vodville Cinema
Address: 1601 Venables St., Vancouver (fourth window from the alley)