History

From Harbour View to Your Front Lawn: Outdoor Cinema's Jamaican History

Ask anybody Jamaican over fifty about the Harbour View Drive-In and watch their face change.

Outdoor cinema isn't new here. We're not introducing anything. We're bringing something back.

When Jamaica was full of cinemas

There was a time when this island had cinemas the way we now have bars. Kingston alone had the Regal, the Odeon, the State, the Premier, the Tropical, the Majestic, the Queens, the Ambassador, the Gaiety, the Palace. Out in the parishes there were more: the Capri, the Palladium, the Roxy, the Strand, the Arcadian.

Here's the part that matters for us. A good number of them were open air. Some had no roof whatsoever. Others were only half covered. Watching a film under the night sky with the breeze moving through was simply how a lot of Jamaicans experienced cinema.

There were drive ins as well. Harbour View, Washington Boulevard, and one in New Kingston.

The one everybody remembers

Harbour View Drive-In opened in 1963, one year after Independence, built and run by Palace Amusement. For four decades it was one of the defining social spaces in east Kingston.

The location did half the work. Harbour View sits at the eastern edge of Kingston Harbour, near where the Palisadoes meets the mainland. You could hear the water while you watched.

Fae Ellington, the broadcaster, described it years later better than we could. She talked about the sea breeze coming across, the sound of the shoreline, that feeling of actually being outdoors instead of sealed in a box. She described the freedom of it too. Speaker hooked on your window, feet up, sitting however you felt like sitting, comfortable as your own living room. Her first date as a young woman happened right there.

That's the detail worth holding onto. It was a date spot. A family spot. Somewhere people went to be together, where the film was the occasion rather than the whole point.

How it ended

The drive in closed on 4 September 2004. The very next day, Hurricane Ivan hit. The damage was bad enough that they decided not to reopen.

And that was that. A whole generation grew up afterward with multiplexes, DVDs and streaming, never having watched a film outdoors at all.

Why it's back

Two things changed.

Technology, first. The old drive ins were stuck with either tinny window speakers or loudspeakers that annoyed everyone within half a mile. Wireless silent headphones killed that problem completely. Perfect sound for whoever's watching, silence for everybody else, which means you can now build a cinema in a residential yard and nobody complains.

Scale, second. The old model needed acres, hundreds of cars, and a permanent site. The new one is portable. We come to you, set up for your guests only, and leave.

What we took from it

Di Nex sits in a line that runs back through those open air theatres and that drive in by the harbour.

What we inherited isn't the equipment, which is unrecognisable now. It's understanding what people actually wanted from it. Not a sharper picture. The chance to be outside, together, comfortable, on a warm Jamaican night, with something good to watch.

It was never really about the movie. Still isn't.

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