Last Pálás picture show
When some friends and I wandered into a local off-campus cinema in Santa Barbara a half-century ago to see a new movie, it turned out to be in black and white and it had a profound effect on me. It was the third feature film directed by Peter Bogdanovich (under his own name) and an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel that would put Bogdanovich on the cinematic map. I hadn’t taken any of that on board, though. I think we all went mainly because we knew it had Cybill Shepherd in it.
As I sat there, The Last Picture Show’s story of a small Texas town dying on the vine in the 1950s really connected with me. My own San Joaquin Valley home town wasn’t dying on the vine, but the local culture (including an obsession with high school football) and dusty landscape wasn’t at all unfamiliar. The place’s fortunes are symbolized by the closing of the town’s only movie theater—something that I had indeed lived through. At one time my town had had two functioning cinemas, but I only ever remembered one. By the time I started high school, it had been converted into a fundamentalist church. The other had long since become a beauty parlor.
I have always been sensitive to the closure of cinemas. That is one of the key reasons I always felt at home in or near Seattle. It was a place that cherished its numerous picture palaces, celebrated when a new one opened and mourned when an existing one closed.
I’ve lately been recalling a conversation I had late one evening after watching a Nicolas Roeg movie at the Galway Film Fleadh. I don’t recall exactly which Roeg flick it was, but process of elimination determines it was either in 2006 or 2007. I got to chatting with the fellow who had the pottery studio down by the docks about the new arthouse cinema that was being planned for the area. It would be wonderful to have a proper home for the Film Fleadh and for the Galway Film Society right in the heart of the city, we enthused. It would be like having the Film Fleadh year-round.
A decade later, we were still talking about the new cinema in the future tense. The project—being built on a site donated by the city council and funded by the national Department of Arts and the Irish Film Board, had been beset by delays due to floods, a national financial crisis, funding shortfalls, and a complicated management structure. Fourteen years after it was first proposed, it finally opened almost exactly seven years ago as I write this.
Galway’s picture palace
The result was impressive. The design by dePaor Architects was like a massive concrete 3‑D jigsaw puzzle. Stairs went up and down at weird angles and widths to form something like a multi-level maze. The biggest screen was underground. Two other screens could be accessed by steep stairs or by discovering the well hidden lift. Originally called Galway’s Picture Palace—a nod to the Claddagh Palace, a nearby beloved cinema that closed in 1995—by the time it opened, it was called simply Pálás—an Irish word for a massive house. (Disclaimer: a quarter-century in Ireland has done nothing for my proficiency in the native language, but a dictionary I consulted suggests that teach pictiúr or pictiúrlann might be a preferred translation of picture palace.)
The building had a fancy bar and restaurant and a box office (in the early days anyway), although technically inside the building, was strangely in the path of winds and Galway’s horizontal rain. There was a modern online ticket-purchasing system complete with wall-mounted printers and scanners at the auditorium entrances that promised a completely human-interaction-free movie-going experience. It never really worked out that way, though. Right up to the last days, a visit inevitably involved talking to someone behind a counter who consults a printed list of names.
In short, it was destination of entertainment, even quite apart from the film screenings. And the film screenings were exactly what we hoped for. There were films from all over the world, flicks perhaps not commercial enough for the multiplexes (although there were many of those as well), and creatively designed and themed series of archival screenings, right up to recent weeks, such as a retrospective of works of the late David Lynch.
On the very first weekend, we showed up to see Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya. Some of us were soon back for screenings of Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman and Terry Gilliam’s classic Brazil. Many more visits followed, although I do not want to exaggerate my patronage. The reality was that Pálás’s location on Merchants Road was not the easiest or most convenient in terms of traffic and parking for those of us living well away from the city, but I always maintained my membership in whatever loyalty program they had going.
A particularly cherished memory is the holiday period when my kid, home from college in Dublin, and I devoted a chunk of our lives to a marathon screening of the extended versions of Peter Jackson’s three The Lord of the Rings blockbusters. Do the math. With breaks in between, it works out to a half-rotation of planet earth—and all those hours just flew.
Pálás became my venue of choice for the annual summer ritual known as the Galway Film Fleadh. For reasons I don’t even recall now, I wasn’t around for the fleadh during Pálás’s inaugural inclusion, but I was there for its sophomore run—and it was great. The seats were much more comfortable and the atmosphere more relaxed than the Town Hall Theatre, and it was a much more pleasant walk and destination than the Omniplex (now the IMC) anchoring the Galway Retail Park. An extra perk was that sometimes the volunteer manning the door was a friend of my kid’s who just waved me through with a smile without even asking for a ticket or checking a list.
Then came the pandemic, and the fleadh and Pálás screenings became a fond memory and future hope. I happily returned for the 2022 and 2023 editions, but the fact was that the global lockdowns had had their effect. Streaming films at home was becoming more of an ingrained habit for many of us. It was a tough time for smaller, eclectic, non-corporate-backed cinemas.
The inevitable bad news finally came about a week before Christmas. Pálás announced it had made the “difficult decision” to close down at the end of February. My heart sighed, and I thought to myself, I must definitely try to get down there for one last movie before it’s gone. Fate had more ambitious plans. Fate, in this case, means my dear, thoughtful friend Dayle in Seattle, who for whatever reason decided to send me a generous gift card for Pálás for Christmas—not realizing there was a deadline involved. It was generous enough that the Missus and I would have to see a movie on a near-weekly basis during whatever periods of non-inclement weather occurred during the following two months.
So, we had our own mini-film festival as a way of saying slán to Pálás. We caught up with such awards contenders as Anora, Conclave, Babygirl and A Complete Unknown. The lengthy screening of The Brutalist seemed particularly apt, as one could imagine Adrien Brody’s titular fictional architect having actually designed Pálás.
No coming attractions
At some point we realized that our kid, now in Chicago, had left behind a gift card of her own and that we should also use that up as well. So, more movies to see. Would we use up all our credit in time? Okay, I’ve made this a bit dramatic. For the past seven years Pálás, while owned by Galway City Council, has been operated by Element Pictures, producer of films like The Guard and TV series like Normal People and Conversations with Friends and co-producer of films like The Favourite and Poor Things. They also own the Light House Cinema in Dublin, so we could have used the gift cards there as well. But it makes a better story if we had to see all the movies at Pálás under deadline.
In mid-February we were part of a large turnout (swelled by the Galway Film Society and the local Brazilian community) to see Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here. The next day I went with my friend and neighbor and fellow film buff Brendan to see Sinéad O’Shea’s brilliant documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story. Two days ago, I went to see it again, this time with the Missus because I knew she’d enjoy it and because I wanted to see it again. So, Blue Road turned out to be the last film I would ever see at Pálás.
Or will it? Those hunks of concrete blocks of a building certainly aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There is an organized group in Galway staging protests, insisting that the city council find a way to keep the cinema going. It’s hard to believe that someone somehow won’t figure out a way to bring the magic lantern back to life. Please just don’t turn it into a church or a beauty parlor.
As a young Jeff Bridges observed forlornly back in that 1971 movie, “Won’t be much to do in town with the picture show closed.”
-S.L., 28 February 2025
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