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Port (Cinéaste) Cinema
The Port Cinema aka Port Cinéaste Cinema was at 86 Adelaide Street Fremantle, 1976-2001. The building and many shops were demolished at the end of 2014, so that a Hilton hotel could be built on the site. This now seems unlikely to occur.
WA CinemaWeb page
Port Cinema from the eastern side, with demolition just commenced. We see also the screen formerly used for outdoor screenings by FTI, which is on the other side of this western end of the Princess May Park. The picture garden facility was called Bohemia Outdoor Cinema.
Appendix
What follows is the whole entry, unedited, for this former cinema from the ammpt (Australian Museum Of Motion Picture & Television Inc.) site - not as an act of copyright theft but as a backup. Websites often disappear for various reasons.
On this site, a service station was demolished to build a £978,000 complex comprising offices, shops and undercover parking facilities. It was financed by the Fremantle City Council, from trust funds, so the Council were able to assure ratepayers that they would not have to carry any financial burden for the cinema within this complex. This cinema was named the Port, was leased to City Theatres, and opened on 17 December 1976:
In line with Council policy on new buildings, the building has been designed to blend with existing buildings, in this case the restored schools which are now PIFT and the Community Education Centre.
The Port Cinema is a plushly appointed, 400-seat theatre with the most modern and efficient projection equipment available.
The big first floor foyer overlooks the Princess May Park and a coffee shop on the ground floor actually spills into the park.
City Theatres plan to make the Port Cinema an important part of the life of Fremantle – and they have started with a policy of using new releases of films with a wide entertainment appeal.
The Fremantle City Council built the cinema after the constant demand by people in the city for a commercial cinema showing general films. (Daily News, 16 December 1976)
City Theatres was later taken over by a consortium, which sold all their theatre interests to Hoyts in 1988. In the rationalisation of Hoyts cinemas which followed, the lease of the Port was taken over by Peter Thomson of Coastal Cinemas, who also operated the Essex St cinemas and those in Queens Gate. It was then called the Port Cineaste, and new seating was installed in 1993. In 1997, after the FTI cinema moved to the Lumiere in Perth, it was the nearest thing Fremantle had to an arthouse cinema. However, when the Millenium Cinema opened in September 1999, the Cineaste was closed for conventional screenings, and used for previews and trade screenings only, until the lease expired in 2001, when the cinema went dark permanently.Sources: Public Works Department, Building approval 29 Mar. 1976 (Battye Library 1459)
Max Bell, Perth: a cinema history, The Book Guild, Lewes, 1986 p.39-40
Daily News, 16 Dec. 1976
Fremantle Gazette, (10 Dec. 1975?), 2 Dec. 1977
Kino, no.33, September 1990, p.23; no.43, March 1993, p.31; no.69, Spring 1999, p.35; no.78, Summer 2001, p.55
West Australian 1977 – 1997
Interview (Margaret Howroyd): Peter Thomson (1994)
Interview (Ina Bertrand): Peter Thomson (1997)
Photos: 25 interiors/exteriors, colour, 1981 (Roy Mudge)
1 exterior, colour, 1981 (Bill Turner)
2 interior, colour, bio box, 1987, Roy Mudge
1 exterior, b&w, Max Bell, Perth: a cinema history, The Book Guild, Lewes, 1986 p.39
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 14 November, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/cinemas/port.html (it was last updated on 6 December, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.