Cinema, Inc. in its 50th year of educating members about movies

Fed up with the lack of film options in Raleigh 50 years ago, a group of IBM workers from upstate New York decided to start their own film society. Using borrowed projection equipment that was installed in the Raleigh Little Theater, they organized as a nonprofit organization whose purpose was, according to its incorporation papers, “the presentation of films of educational, cultural, artistic and historical interest.”

After about 15 years, the organization, now known as The Cinema, Inc., moved to the Rialto in the city’s Five Points neighborhood. There, every second Sunday of the month at 7 p.m., the group screens a series of eclectic works – everything from silents to documentaries, foreign-language films to animation.

“We try to show films that have quality to them,” says Peter Corson, president of the group, which is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year. “We don’t show commercial films; I don’t think we’ll ever show a ‘Die Hard’ film.”

This year’s schedule is typical of the group’s range of offerings. This Sunday, the featured flick is the 1967 rom-com “King of Hearts,” about a WWI soldier hiding out in an insane asylum. Other offerings include the Jack Nicholson classic “Five Easy Pieces,” the Ingmar Bergman playing-chess-with-Death masterpiece “The Seventh Seal,” and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing up a storm in the 1935 Oscar winner “Top Hat.”

Corson admits the group’s membership skews older – although they have had the occasional N.C. State student – and a bit conservative. “They will walk out if the language goes really south,” he says, “but that’s rare. And we have had members who delighted in telling us how much they despised a film that had too much sex in it – but we will show a film with sex in it, and we will tell them in advance.”

Films are chosen by three to four people from the group’s 15-person board, who put together a list of possibilities from their own suggestions and those of members. “We’ll end up with a list of 60 films, vote on it in several steps, then reduce it to 12 films, evenly divided between foreign-language and English-speaking,” says Corson.

Not that everything they wanted to show has made it onto the Rialto’s screen. In the past, some choices were unavailable because of the theater’s ancient projection system; distributors were afraid their films would be chewed up by the equipment. But “once the Rialto went digital,” says Corson, “the universe of films was open to us.”

Each screening, which averages 250 attendees, is accompanied by extensive notes on the film emailed to members, but there are no after-film discussions. “At different times we have tried to discuss a film afterwards, but it never works out,” says Corson, “because there’s always someone who dominates the conversation, and that kills the whole thing.”

Corson, who says his favorite filmmaker is the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (whose works “are like psychiatric sessions”), adds that “people look at us as an entertainment group, but we are an educational organization. And our objective is to educate people on the history of cinema and the different types of cinema.”

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Cinema, Inc. in its 50th year of educating members about movies."