The Belcourt Theatre
Film Archive

The project began in 2013, shortly after I started working at the Belcourt that July. That fall, I realized the theatre had no records of the films it had shown before switching to ticketing software in 2008 — leaving nearly a century of programming history undocumented.

To fill that gap, I started making trips to the downtown Nashville library, scrolling through old issues of the Tennessean on microfilm and jotting down film titles and dates by hand. A few years later, the Tennessean's archives were digitized and made searchable through Newspapers.com, which made the work considerably faster. I went through the paper week by week, recording each film along with its opening and closing dates. That research forms the foundation of the entire database.

With a list of film titles and dates in hand, the next step was enriching the data with additional details — director, genre, country of origin, and so on. To do this, I needed to match each title against a database. I chose IMDb.

I wrote a script that matched film titles by both title and release year. For films from the 1960s through the mid-1990s, this was straightforward — nearly everything the Belcourt showed during that era was a new release, so the years lined up cleanly.

Things got more complicated after 1997, when Watkins took over programming and the Belcourt began showing repertory films. A repertory screening creates an ambiguity problem: the year a film played at the Belcourt may have nothing to do with the year it was released. For example, if the archive shows "Taxi Driver" playing in 2021, the obvious assumption is the Martin Scorsese film from 1976 — but IMDb also lists a Korean TV series called Taxi Driver that premiered in 2021. Without additional context, a simple title-and-year match breaks down.

To handle this, I revised the script to surface a list of candidates for manual review rather than making automatic matches. From 2013 onward, I was also able to draw on my own memory, having worked at the Belcourt since that year.

That said, some uncertainty is unavoidable. The film titles and opening/closing dates are the most reliable data in this archive — when in doubt, trust those first.

The majority of data from 1925–2008 was drawn from the Belcourt's weekly newspaper advertisements — published under the theater's various names over the decades — as they appeared in The Tennessean. These were accessed either through microfilm copies at the Nashville Public Library's downtown branch or via the digitized edition of The Tennessean on Newspapers.com.

For a period roughly spanning 2001–2008, the Belcourt ran newspaper ads less consistently. Data for those years was supplemented using a combination of the digitized Tennessean, archived snapshots of the Belcourt's early website via the Wayback Machine (available through Archive.org), and internal clippings from the Belcourt's own records.

Beginning in 2008, the Belcourt transitioned to Agile Ticketing Solutions, which maintains historical records of all films screened at the theater. This system served as the primary source for all data from 2008 to the present.

I wanted to focus on just the films that the Belcourt programmed. The following are not included:

• Concerts
• Seminars
• Rental Screenings
• Film Festivals not put on by the Belcourt (NJFF, BANFF, REEL ROCK)

The series column is still being updated. We added some of the bigger series the Belcourt has done, but we are certainly missing a lot of them. Check back soon for more updates.

In 2019, internal Belcourt document logs started noting when we played 35mm prints of films. This has not been added to every instance that a 35mm print was shown of a film. However, if the logs say we played a print of the film, I have added a note to the entry.

Reach out! We'd love to hear your feedback. If it's regarding a mistake or correction, be sure to include the title of the film, the date/year it played.