IU Cinema marks first anniversary with high attendance

Roughly a year ago, the showing of “Lawrence of Arabia” filled the then newly opened IU Cinema to capacity.

The venue celebrated its first birthday Jan. 13, and IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers said first-year attendance numbers were better than expected.

“One very pleasant surprise was ... the way people showed up for the cinema,” he said. “In early estimates, we thought the first year we would issue between 19,000 and 20,000 tickets. We issued nearly 50,000.”

The cinema was one renovation to the Theatre and Drama Building that began in October 2009.

The project took nearly a year and a half to complete but has since presented the University with new opportunities.

“The cinema studies program is one of the best in the country,” Vickers said. “There was never a place to support that.”

Professor of film studies Gregory Waller said IU Cinema has provided the facilities to show a wide variety of films, such as international and art house films, and opportunities to interact with visiting members of the film industry. This presents new opportunities for film and media studies in the Department of Communication and Culture, as well as for other students, faculty and community members.

“It gets our students seeing films the way they should be seen — on a big screen, no distractions,” he said.

Waller, who sat on the IU Cinema’s planning committee from the beginning and is now head of the faculty advisor committee, said the facility has also created the capability to show films in 3-D. In early December, IU Cinema screened seven short 3-D films produced by students.

“I encourage students to take a look at this place,” Waller said of IU Cinema. “They will have never been to a screening as good as those screenings.”

Academic partnerships have developed between the cinema and “areas that you wouldn’t think film would necessarily link to coursework,” Vickers said. Examples include the Jacobs School of Music, Polish Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Optometry.

In its first year, the cinema showed 231 individual film titles and was host to 52 film screenings with guest filmmakers.

Vickers said in the year to come, he hopes IU Cinema will continue building a reputation for cinema in universities. He also hopes IU will be recognized for its program. IU Cinema will kick off its second year with, among other things, a seven-film series titled “Australia in the 70s” and a series of films influenced by the work of Charles Dickens in celebration of the writer’s 200th birthday.

“Weekly, we get emails saying that the cinema is an important part of this community already ... that the IU Cinema, in its first year, is a game-changer,” Vickers said. “If nothing more, we’ve already affected the community, which is a good thing.”