With UArts’ closure, the Lightbox Film Center loses its home for the second time

Like many people associated with the University of the Arts, Jesse Pires found the news of the institution’s impending closure not from any official channel but from the news.

“I had left work. I was actually on my way out to see a concert and waiting for the concert to start, and that’s when,” Pires told The Inquirer via Zoom as he packed up his office on Tuesday. “I just got clued in when [The Inquirer] article was published about it.”

Apart from creating significant uncertainty for students and employees, last week’s unexpected announcement of the university’s June 7 shuttering has also raised questions about the fate of the swath of Center City real estate owned by UArts.

The Lightbox Film Center, of which Pires was director, is one of those buildings and a casualty of the university’s closure. The repertory movie theater in the middle of Center City screened international and esoteric cinema fare unlikely to be found at any other Philadelphia film venue.

The Lightbox had been based at UArts, in the former Gershman Y building at 401 S. Broad St., since late 2019. Before that, the program had been at the International House in West Philadelphia since 1970, although it only took on the Lightbox Film Center name in 2017. When International House was sold in 2019, the theater’s future was briefly uncertain until UArts stepped in later that year.

The UArts incarnation of the Lightbox opened in February 2020, and showed just three films before the pandemic shutdown. One of them was a rare exhibition of Bela Tarr’s 1994 Hungarian film Sátántangó. Despite running over seven hours, the film drew a sold-out crowd, including people who drove from as far away as Ohio and North Carolina.

The theater is shuttered, effective immediately. “Since its initial founding in the 1970s, this program has been an incredible resource for the community and we regretfully acknowledge that, at this time, its future is unknown,” Pires posted in a statement to the Lightbox’s social media accounts on Tuesday night.

Scheduled events have been canceled, including a June 6 premiere of the Scribe Video Center’s Precious Places Community program (which will now take place on the Scribe premises) and a June 28 matinee of the 1971 Jack Nicholson movie Drive, He Said.

Pires started working part-time at what was then Film at International House in the 1990s when he was a Temple undergraduate. He has worked at Lightbox full-time since 2004, moving with it to UArts. In addition to his work as director and curator of the Lightbox, Pires taught film at the university while overseeing an ambitious film preservation program.

“There’s a lot to be proud of,” Pires said. “Certainly, just being able to keep this decades-old project going for so long, this decades-old project that has been a mainstay in Philadelphia.” He also pointed to the film preservation project, which has finished preserving six films, all in partnership with other institutions. One, the 1996 film Naked Acts, will be shown at New York City’s Brooklyn Academy of Music beginning on June 14.

Sarah Mueller, an UArts alum, worked at the Lightbox during its last year in West Philly, having discovered the theater when her professors took students there for film screenings. The founder of the locally-based film organization cinéSPEAK, Mueller hosted a Lightbox screening in early May of the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus.

“I credit UArts with really seeding the community and training me in the sort of way to think about collaborative art-making,” Mueller said. “I was there for the whole ‘What is going to happen to Lightbox’ conversation, so we were all really thankful that it found a home at UArts. As an alumna, I was incredibly excited, also a little bit jealous, of all the UArts students that would get a chance to experience the provocative curation that Jesse does.”

Mueller also considered “all the artists who may not come to Philadelphia because of UArts closing.”

Paul Lewis, who works at the University of Pennsylvania, estimates that he saw hundreds of films at the Lightbox over the years across both venues. He called the experience “essentially my film education.” His favorite recent showings at the Lightbox included the 1992 Austrian film Flaming Ears and Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, which he called “a transcendent experience.”

“One thing I was excited to see that Jesse was doing was filling the hole,” Mueller said, referring to finding a place for films that had nowhere else to screen in Philadelphia. “It’s sad, we’ve lost another venue.”

Pires and technical director James Fraatz were the only two full-time employees at Lightbox. Robert Cargni, who frequently ran the projector at both the International House and UArts incarnations of the theater died in October, and a celebration of his life was held there.

Filmmakers will also miss the theater.

Robert Mugge filmed a scene from his 1980 documentary, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, on the roof of International House and screened it at the old and new Lightbox. Last September, he returned to the theater to show his 1978 film, Amateur Night at City Hall: The Story of Frank L. Rizzo. At that showing, Mugge reunited with his former attorney, Richard P. Jaffe, a UArts trustee, who died in March.

“Now, just two months after we lost him, this legendary art school is closing as well, and with it, Jesse’s wonderful film programs,” Mugge told The Inquirer in an email. “Although I had no ongoing relationship with the university itself, in so many ways, this feels like the end of an era.”

The Lightbox has risen from the prospect of near-death once before. Could it rise again and set up shop elsewhere?

For now, Pires is looking for a new job. But he would love to find a way for the Lightbox to continue.

“I did hear about the possible Temple merger,” he said, “I don’t know enough about it, but I’m certainly intrigued. Temple is where my career in cinema began so that would be pretty remarkable if it comes to fruition.”

He also intends to meet other “partners, colleagues, and various institutions to keep that discussion going.”

Pires hopes to continue to work in this field, and having spent so much of his life with the UArts film program, he knows “how valuable it is and how important it is to so many people.”

“The city deserves a space that showcases innovative, rare, important works of film,” he said. “That’s certainly something that I’d like to see continue to happen. And if I can be part of it that would be great.”

(Disclosure: Some current Inquirer staff members serve on cinéSPEAK’s board.)