Discovering Cinema Typologies in Urban Cinema Cultures: Comparing Programming Strategies in Antwerp and Amsterdam, 1952–1972

Recent scholarly work on cinema’s past has shown that the audience’s leisure and cinema-going activities were firmly rooted in the sociocultural geographies of cities. This chapter aims at further developing this line of research by experimenting with a bottom-up, data-driven approach to analyse the typology of cinemas in Amsterdam and Antwerp in 1952, 1962 and 1972. It asks if such an approach can provide us with new ways of identifying clusters of cinemas that share a set of characteristics which may or may not be in line with existing classifications. The results of the analysis invite a rethinking of the type ‘premiere theatre’, the relation between run order and seating capacity, and the centre-periphery distinction. The chapter also shows that a ‘scalable’ research framework can provide us with new perspectives on the local cinema cultures that shaped modern identities in the post-war period in their own, unique ways.