Rex Alive — reliving the era of open air cinema
Today I visited the almost-ninety-year-old Rex Cinema downtown Accra with Anita Afonu, my ‘twinie’ with whom I share a “passion à préserver.” She is an advocate for the preservation of what’s left of our film and cinema history. Up to 5 decades ago, it was an entertaiment landmark with the Roger Club, Arts Centre theatre, and the Accra Community Centre.
Now it is inconspicuous and almost concealed by table top shops and wooden stalls that have turned the pavements into street malls leading to the ever-bustling Tema bus station. Its distinctive Dutch Cape gable (hoop de Constantia) styled entrance, typical of 18th-century Cape Town architecture, is seemingly squashed between the 20th-century modernist EOCO office and the ECG Makola branch located on the High Street end of Independence Avenue.
In Rex Cinema, Anita finds optimism that all of her hard work globe-trotting in pursuit of our old films—visual archives of our history now dispersed in different film archives across the world will find a home in a restored, repurposed, and operational Rex Cinema.
As a child, I remember the evening when my mother (God bless her history-loving soul) took my brother and me to see “The Great Race,” a 1965 American Technicolor epic slapstick comedy film directed by Blake Edwards, starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood, at this venue back in 1975. I was excited and the sight snd sounds stuck with me like chewing gum under a lecture room chair.
Today it is my wish to see it nominated among the first ten buildings to be on the National Register of Heritage Buildings backed by new heritage legislation to protect heritage buildings in Ghana. This will put an end to the evil gaze of greedy developers with friends in high places who have in the recent past, dreamed of erasing it and replacing it with a multi-story carpark.
Built in 1937 and set in colonial times, the Rex then owned by a Lebanese family, served as an entertainment hub for post-war colonial government officials, aristocrats, and prominent families in Accra. To serve the public, the newly formed Ghana Film Industry Corporation took over the theater during the independence era. Visitors would be seated in the VIP box directly in front of the projector room, including President Kwame Nkrumah and his spouse, Madam Fathia. Between 1945 and 1975, it featured the latest Hollywood feature films, which were sweeping the globe.
Since then, films have dominated human existence, but now that they can be viewed on a smartphone, movie theatres are empty, bringing the cinema experience to the verge of extinction.
For the (millions) of urban heritage enthusiasts, tourists, and visitors to the city of Accra who wish to relive the open-air cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, Rex will hopefully soon come to life once more. It will also serve as a location where the history of Ghana's film and TV can be told through a display of vintage projectors, movie posters, and the photographs and work of Dr. Chris Hesse, Ghana's esteemed film cameraman, President Kwame Nkrumah's cinematographer, and a founding member of the Ghana Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Authored by Arc David Kojo Derban