Revenant cinema

Abstract

Mass art par excellence, essentially reproductive and temporary, cinema was present in all corners of modern city. If any architecture could be fully identified with the spirit of modernity, it would be its movie theaters, displaced in the mid-twentieth century by television and other phenomena that, especially in neighborhoods, caused their demolition or transformation into garages, warehouses, shops and evangelic temples. This work is focused in that last and singular form of occupation to establish two dimensions of the spreading of popular worship in Latin American cities (in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile as study cases) conserving attributes of which perhaps have been the only academic architectures builded in its suburbs and slums. The contribution made by present-day Christianity makes possible to point out its importance, even though they are —as facts of modernity— doomed to dissolve.