Disused small-town and neighborhood movie theaters are to photographer Putnam what the decrepit churches and storefronts of the rural South were to Walker Evans: objects that, austerely photographed in their decline, can cause us to reflect. On what, though, I’m uncertain. Just as Evans’s pictures were always too stark for mere nostalgia, Putnam’s are a little too artless to transcend it. Putnam did, however, make me think about how changing values, changing technologies, and changing economic priorities are reflected first in our landscapes and then, perhaps, in our souls, which are ever yearning, not always appropriately, for the past. As you study Putnam’s well-composed and well-lit photographs of abandoned theaters, a pang for the lost past inevitably afflicts you. Even more saddening is his record of conversions—theaters turned into evangelical churches, bookshops, banks, restaurants, a swimming pool. As writer Molly Haskell observes in the best of the four brief essays included in this slender, handsome volume, the disappearance of the community theaters signaled "the passing of a way of being together." But she also notes that the movies shown in these theaters were powerful anticommunitarian instruments: "The most engaging heroes were possessed by wanderlust; the smartest working-women heroines believed in self-betterment; the increasingly dominant tone was against provincialism." In short, content inevitably trumped architecture.

So did show-biz economics. In his introduction, New York University film professor Robert Sklar points out that the small-town and neighborhood theaters had always been a nuisance to Hollywood. They needed to change their bills more frequently than the first-run houses—as often as three times a week—which forced the studios to make more pictures. Renting films for as little as $10 a run, these theaters never contributed much to the distributors’ prosperity. A big-city picture palace could generate $10,000 a week; a small-town theater might produce just $1,500 a year. Given the cost of extra prints and shipping, distributors might do no better than break even. As a result, these theaters were doomed well before television.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. An awful lot of shoddy movies were made with an eye toward the small towns, where exhibitors tended to be noisy cultural conservatives. Beyond that, I’m not sure that community values are all that important when it comes to movies. We may go to the theater in a crowd, but once the picture begins we are alone with it, voyeurs peering into a lighted window, thinking our own thoughts, mulling our own fantasies. The structure surrounding this somewhat onanistic activity is relatively insignificant.

What’s important are the movies themselves. Instead of mourning the past, we might more usefully discuss how contemporary distribution and exhibition practices— particularly the emphasis on the first-weekend grosses of movies playing on 2,500 screens— affect what we now see. And don’t see. But that’s a different argument, one that this pretty, but to me rather idle, book does not take up.

—Richard Schickel