Cinerama — ahem, SIFF Cinema Downtown — is back

The ceiling of the theater formerly known as Cinerama still sparkles with tiny stars, and you can still gaze up at it and imagine the magic of a perfectly clear night sky. The room still feels enormous and strangely hushed, and if you’re lucky enough to be one of the first few people to enter it for a screening, you suddenly feel very small, enveloped in its waiting quiet. And the screen is even larger than you remember it being, giant and curved and filled with dreams.

SIFF Cinema Downtown, formerly known as Cinerama (the name had to be changed for licensing reasons), reopens this week with the film “Wonka” after a closure of nearly four years. It’s now owned and operated by the Seattle International Film Festival, who purchased it earlier this year from Paul Allen’s estate. Like a lot of us who loved the place — opened in 1963 on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Lenora Street in the Belltown neighborhood; renovated and reopened in 1999; closed, seemingly indefinitely, in February 2020 — I thought about it often during those years it sat dark. Did the ghosts of movies past occasionally flicker on that screen, playing for an audience of shadows? Did those red seats remember that we had once sat there, rapt and still? Could you still smell the faint sweetness of chocolate popcorn, even though the poppers sat quiet, gathering dust?

Though I’ve already been there twice this month (for special events, ahead of the official opening Thursday), it still seems unreal to me that the theater — called “a cathedral of cinema” by SIFF executive director Tom Mara in remarks at a program there Tuesday — is back. As all of us who are no longer very young know, life can often seem like a series of goodbyes, with people and places that we’ve loved leaving us one by one, only memories left behind. And they don’t come back — unless, like a miracle, they do.

I first saw a movie at Cinerama in the 1990s; it was Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and I remember being absolutely dazzled by the bigness of it, how it seemed to wrap around you with its eerie music and mesmerizing story of loss. On Tuesday this week, more than a quarter-century later, I slipped away from the champagne-sipping crowd in the lobby for a SIFF reception to go sit in the theater, nearly alone, remembering what I’d seen there. So many memories: “Master and Commander,” with the water seeming to splash from the screen. “Harry Potter” screenings with my nephew. Some glorious singalong screenings, with that massive room seemingly filled with joy — “Mary Poppins,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Funny Girl.” Michael Powell’s dreamy “The Tales of Hoffman,” in its heaven-sent Technicolor. Unexpected treasure found back when Cinerama was part of SIFF’s annual festival; I particularly remember a gorgeous Korean adaptation of “Les Liaisons dangereuses,” called “Untold Scandal.” “Avengers: Endgame,” with its haunting elegy; little did we know how close we were then, in spring 2019, to what might have been Cinerama’s endgame.

The former Cinerama’s return is, of course, no miracle. It’s the result of a lot of work by and on behalf of SIFF — fundraising and donations and money from local government. And it’s not exactly the same as it was before: The menu’s slightly different (though there’s still chocolate popcorn), the bathrooms are now gender-neutral (marked “toilets” and “toilets and urinals”), and there’s that new name. SIFF Cinema Downtown is a perfectly serviceable and geographically appropriate name, and I understand the legalities and branding issues that necessitated the name change. But the theater will always be Cinerama in my heart, and quite possibly yours.

Whatever we call it, the theater’s return won’t change a few hard truths: A lot of Seattleites are reluctant to go downtown these days, and streaming has changed moviegoing habits for many of us, possibly permanently. The number of movie theaters within the city limits, particularly single-screen ones, has dropped significantly in recent memory. Beth Barrett, SIFF’s artistic director, gave a brief roll call Tuesday night of theaters long gone: among them the UA 150, the King Cat, the Harvard Exit, the Guild 45^th.

SIFF Cinema Downtown, aka The Former Cinerama, might well have been on that list — but it’s not. Sometimes, life works out the way it should. Sometimes, something you love comes back. Sometimes — not often enough, but sometimes — you get a Hollywood ending. See you at the movies.