 How
Dana Keith Brought Arthouse Film Culture to Washington Avenue
It began as a glimmer in the mind’s eye. In that movie playing in his
head, Miami Beach Cinematheque (MBC) founder and director Dana Keith
envisioned an intimate space in which South Beach’s increasingly
sophisticated cinema lovers could come together to see the best and most
provocative international and American independent titles without having
to endure the impersonal multiplex experience. That dream of having this
communal arthouse setting entered an exciting new phase on February 27
with the opening of the new MBC on the ground floor of the Historic City
Hall on Washington Avenue and 11th Street.
It’s precisely in this location where Keith sat down with SunPost on
a rainy Saturday afternoon to chronicle how he was able to secure
this prime piece of real estate, and also to reaffirm his devotion
to South Beach. “This is a very unique little neighborhood, and it
deserves to have world-class culture,” says Keith, who cited the New
World Symphony’s Frank Gehry Campus and the renovation of the Bass
Museum of Art as recent landmarks in the development of the local
arts scene. “What was missing was a world-class cinematheque,” he
adds.
The new venue is an upgrade from the cozy Española Way location that was
home to MBC from 2003 to 2010, one that architect and longtime supporter
Scott Weinkle likens to “being invited into someone’s living room where
the host introduced the film.” “Then afterwards,” Weinkle continues,
“people actually discussed the film and often went to the café A La
Folie [next door].”
Even though the new MBC has earned nothing but rave reviews from
journalists and patrons alike, the journey to get there proved to be, in
Keith’s words, “a long, long, convoluted, complicated process.” In
cinematic terms, think of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, the Irish rubber
baron portrayed by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.
This grueling ordeal did, indeed, feel like attempting to pull a
steamship up a steep hill in Peru, and it began with the realization
that the Miami Beach Film Society, the nonprofit organization behind MBC,
was outgrowing its original location.
“[The Española Way space] was charming, and it was perfect for that time
and place, but it was [also] limiting in the accessibility, for new
people to discover what we were doing,” he concedes. The rising rent in
his building and a lack of parking for audience members who drove there
from the mainland prompted Dana to start looking for a more suitable
venue. “Imagine us, over on Española Way, [in] this Gothic revival, very
cool little space, trying to determine where to move to, what could
potentially be the next step.” He didn’t have to search very far to
find it, and in 2008 his attention was drawn to the City of Miami
Beach’s seven million-dollar renovation of Historic City Hall.
“I had a particular appreciation for this building because I really,
really appreciate Spanish/Mediterranean revival architecture, and
when the scaffolding came off I saw the Parking Department [on the
ground floor] sitting there,” Keith reveals. He took a look at the
abandoned offices, which were in disarray. “The space itself was a
mess. It was as if the administrative use was temporary. The walls
in here came two feet from the windows,” Keith says. Even in its
chaotic state, he realized that this space could fulfill MBC’s
potential to give Miami’s arthouse crowd the kind of experience that
he often had during his modeling days in Europe in the 1980s.
“A lot of times I was going [to the movies] by myself, between jobs,
going to see [films like Andrei] Tarkovsky’s Stalker way
across town, and I was one of five people [inside the theater], but
those five people shared a deep, deep appreciation for what they’re
seeing, like going to a museum and seeing a painting on the wall” he
recalls. While he roamed the streets of Paris, on the other side of
the Atlantic a video revolution was taking place. Film aficionados
were choosing to stay home and appreciate classic cinema from the
comfort of their own homes, a situation that Keith will never accept
as an alternative to the theater experience, no matter how elaborate
and sophisticated your home theater might be.
“The art of cinema, to me, should be shown on a screen where it
controls you rather than you controlling it. [Watching films] on
television, you’re in control. In the cinema you’re allowing the
artist to take control. and that’s very important, because to me
these are creations by an artist,” Keith says.
His involvement with the fashion industry, which included
representing Versace Couture, led him to move to South Beach in the
fall of 1992, right after Hurricane Andrew. During the two decades
that followed, Keith witnessed the changes in the city’s artistic
community. “That’s exactly the reason why it’s so important to
retain and continue this desire to keep something like [MBC] going.
There’s been a lot of movement from the [local] artists off the
Beach, to the Design District first and Wynwood second,” he says.
Miami Beach’s commissioners, as well as Mayor Matti Herrera Bower,
were all on board to make the new MBC a reality in Historic City
Hall. “Everyone wanted this to happen, [but] the process itself
involved two commission readings in order to get a space in a
historic property, or any property that the city owns,” Keith
informs. The commission readings took place several months apart,
and thus Keith entered the initial phase in his journey:
negotiations. “When you have the city as the landlord, you’ve got to
make the rent viable and attractive for both sides,” he says.
Six months and several city commission hearings later, Keith was ready
to move on to the next level in his quest: permitting. It was at this
point that he began to assemble a creative team of local professionals
that had never collaborated on a project before. The first name on his
list: Scott Weinkle. “I had already designed the proscenium at the old
Cinematheque and had designed other film-related spaces like the Jonas
Mekas Visual Arts Center in Lithuania [and] The Stendhal Gallery and the
New York Film Cooperative, so we both felt it was inevitable that I
would be the architect for the new Cinematheque,” Weinkle writes via
email.
Rhythm Foundation Board Chair and MBC patron James Quinlan suggested to
Keith that he add interior designer Jeffrey Barone to the mix, and his
background couldn’t be more different from Weinkle’s. “Scott comes from
a modernist approach, and Jeffrey, on the other hand, is a designer who
integrates a lot of antiques and reclaimed objects in his projects,”
Keith says. A fierce admirer of early 20th Century real estate titan
Carl Fisher and original Historic City Hall designer Martin L. Hampton,
Barone favors wood and various concrete textures. Thus, when he refers
to his approach as “green,” he’s not referring to the color. “I have a
love for, a need for, reuse, and just as importantly, negotiating what
is going to our dumps,” Barone says.
With the union of these gifted craftsmen, Keith was sure he’d found the
balance between classic and contemporary styles that he was looking for.
“To me, the combination of Scott and Jeffrey was perfect. We didn’t want
to duplicate this building exactly how it was in 1927 because, as a
museum [-like venue] you need a modernist-type angle, so we created this
space almost as if it were a sculpture in the middle of the historic
shell of the building,” he says.
With a common goal as to what the finished product should look like,
Keith began to break the news of MBC’s impending move to his Miami
Beach Film Society members and regular MBC patrons. To achieve this
purpose, Keith and his graphic designer came up with a video that
gave viewers a virtual tour of the new MBC, one that he played at
every screening prior to closing down the Española Way location in
June of 2010. Keith also organized several fundraisers throughout
the year, including a “Community 5% Day” at the South Beach Whole
Foods in which five percent of that day’s net sales was donated to
MBC.
In August, two months after leaving Española Way, Keith embarked on
the third and most arduous part of his journey: construction.
Weinkle remembers how each day would bring a new obstacle. “It
seemed everywhere we turned – from digging into a 82-year-old
concrete slab to working with existing air conditioning systems,
fire standpipes and lightning grounding wires – we were looking at
an uphill battle,” he reveals. Keith winces at the mention of this
period. “All of these construction issues seemed to be endless and,
to me, they became quite painful. I laugh about it now, but at the
time it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.”
Keith remains diplomatic when discussing his collaborators’
differences of opinion. “In any project where you put two artists
together there are going to be disagreements, and of course, there
were,” he says. Case in point: the vaulted ceiling Barone wanted to
build. “He was very strongly interested in bringing that aspect into
the project, and Scott was pretty much against it, mainly because of
the budget, and the complications [that would have involved] doing
it, so we ended up with a simple, streamlined kind of ceiling,”
Keith says. Barone uses a culinary metaphor to describe the creative
process. “Dana put sugar and salt to the mix to get an unusual
flavor, and with that comes two completely different ingredients
which ultimately makes the cake,” he says.
It was Barone’s idea to make the new MBC an environmentally responsible
space, and on this matter everyone was on the same page. “Our
construction was a green process: recycled cement, the green way of
disposing trash. That was more expensive and it took longer, [but] all
of these elements were there because we wanted to do it right,” Keith
says. Barone also suggested adding the type of black-and-white tile that
Carl Fisher would have used. “I have been working with a real historical
Cuban tile maker, who has had a shop in Miami for the past 50 years,”
Barone reveals. “Not only do I use his local shop, which makes these
hand-pressed tiles out of local materials. I take it one step further,
and only use overrun products that have already been made for other
clients who either order too much or changed their minds.”
During this period, Keith held several screenings at the ballroom of
the Raleigh Hotel on Collins Avenue, which became MBC’s temporary
home and was also the site where the Miami Beach Film Society first
started screening movies before it found its first home on Española
Way. Among the movies Keith screened were Alain Resnais’s Wild
Grass and a digital
restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’sBreathless. The
original goal was to have the City Hall space open by October, just
in time for Art Basel, but rising costs and labor delays forced
Keith to miss that deadline. “These structural engineering [issues],
these inspections, these back-and-forth reviews just went on
literally for almost a year, and at one point, I was wondering, like
Klaus Kinski [in Fitzcarraldo],
‘Is this going to happen or not?’”
Just when the future seemed uncertain for the completion of the new
MBC, Keith’s determination received a boost from some of the city’s
philanthropists.“Thank God we had a combination of individuals,
foundations and corporate sponsors. That’s what really made this
[endeavor] come together: passionate Founding Circle members with
connections to foundations,” he says. Keith singles out Robert Crane
and his wife Shirley Munoz as instrumental allies. “He’s very well
connected to the New York foundation world,” Keith says. When
Nespresso signed on as a corporate sponsor, Keith realized he’d
found the last piece of the puzzle. “It’s great to have someone on
the corporate side who gets the project, who gets the complications
and the struggle.”
That struggle officially came to an end on February 27, as MBC
became, as it has for several years, the only venue in Miami
selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to host
and be the beneficiary of Oscar Night America. The difference this
year? The glamour offscreen threatened to match Hollywood’s
red-carpet blitz. “In short, [the new MBC] is more glamorous, more
glorious and now one can see the subtitles,” says Weinkle. “Also,
all of Dana’s incredible archive of books, posters and film
memorabilia is now fully on display, which heightens one’s
appreciation of the art of filmmaking [while] still maintaining the
cozy living room feel of the old Cinematheque,” he adds.
That night also marked the launch of MBC’s first art exhibit in the
new venue’s gallery space, which is located on the side that faces
Washington Avenue. The aptly themed Frank
Worth: Hollywood Legends featured
never-before-seen black-and-white photographs of Elizabeth Taylor
and James Dean taken on the set of Giant.
The exhibit was a collaboration with Miami’s Rudolf Budja Gallery,
and it was the first in what Keith hopes will be an ongoing series
of artistic showcases. Upcoming events in the horizon include
opening an outdoor café and preparing to host the Black American and
Brazilian Film Festivals this summer.
In the first two months at the new space, Keith has programmed films
like Gaspar Noé’s controversial, sexually explicit Cannes Film
Festival sensation Enter
the Void, as well as tamer Oscar-nominated fare like Mike
Leigh’s dramedy Another
Year and the
documentary Waste
Land. This weekend he screens the Argentinian neo-noir Carancho,
which enters its second week at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, and
last year’s cerebral romance Certified
Copy, which nabbed Juliette Binoche the Best Actress award at
Cannes and is screening concurrently at the University of Miami’s
Bill Cosford Cinema. Keith
declares that premiere status is not an issue for him when it
picking release dates on his calendar. “We’re are so far apart from
each other, and that’s what’s so good about the new arthouse cinema
placement. We all have our own territory, so to me it doesn’t matter
if we open a film first or a couple of weeks later or at the same
time, because our support group is here in Miami Beach,” he says.
MBC was actually the only theater in Miami that showed Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the avant garde ghost story
from Thailand that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. Keith wasn’t
sure how the experimental film would go over with his audience, but he
needn’t have worried. “I think that if I’d shown that film four or five
years ago, people would have been a bit puzzled, but I was very
pleasantly surprised with the crowd each night it played. People were
very patient, because that film is not easy, very slow for a Western
audience. I was very happy to see that they were opening their minds to
something different,” he says.
While he discovers a new generation of film buffs with whom to share his
passion for the moving image, Keith is still trying to get used to being
in a more exposed location. “I look out the windows all the time and see
South Beach buzzing around, and I’m so happy to be right in the middle
of everything but [also being] an escape from everything,” he says. This
oasis for cinephiles has come a long way since it was conjured as a
figment of Keith’s imagination. “The little Miami Beach Film Society
accomplished what it set out to do. Here we are.”
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