Scratch'n'sniff seats: can repertory cinema be rescued from multiplex hell?

Attending a press screening of John Waters' Polyester, I was reminded how cinema – proper cinema – is capable of refreshing the parts other media cannot reach. It was being held at Soho Screening Rooms on D'Arblay Street, the industry preview cubbyhole that I still insist on referring to by its previous name: Mr Young's. (I haven't a clue who Mr Young was, but in my mind his handle was always a tantalising hint that the joint could be a front for an international triad.)

We had just been handed the scratch'n'sniff cards allowing us to experience Mr Waters' 1981 film in the full intended "Odorama", and much excitement was forthcoming around the room, to top up the sweet'n'sour chemical bouquet already coming off the gizmo. The intercom coughed into life. "If you really want scratch'n'sniff," interjected the projectionist, "just try rubbing the seats."

That did it for me. The thought of all that savorous film-critic sweat, a marinade of the thousands of hours of delight and disappointment clocked up for the cause. The ineffable people residue of this den of cinephilia had been there all along.

It's that sense of community and fealty that Scalarama, organisers of the screening, are looking to drum up with their September-long festival inspired by London's infamous rep cinema, the Scala – shut down in 1993 following an unlicensed screening of A Clockwork Orange, which was not in distribution at the time. Polyester, at the centre of this year's programme, is on the respectable end of what was typically on the menu in the dark off Pentonville Road in the 1980s.

I'm too young to have visited the Scala, but old enough to get nostalgically fired up about the idea of a pre-internet fleapit-cum-temple to the pagan gods of cinema that, for 50p annual membership, might decide to serve up a double-bill of Evil Dead 2 and Felix the Cat cartoons in tribute to the venue's recently deceased moggie (apparently a Sam Raimi fan. The kind of independent, discerning, spontaneous, disreputable space that now seems almost impossible in a gentrification-run London, let alone anywhere else.

But nostalgia is the first refuge of the doomed. Perhaps repertory cinema – the business of showing old films – has simply had its day. With ever-expanding portions of film history available online, and increasingly streamable through the likes of Netflix, it's not surprisingly that real-world rep is suffering. The Riverside Studios closes for redevelopment this week, with no indications if its programme of double- and triple-bills will resume. With programming at general indie chains being pulled towards the mainstream, the future for rep in general is looking ragged.

Luckily, then, there are stronger reasons to argue the cause. Showing vintage films in public is a way of overcoming the horizontality of internet consumption, the flatness of everything ground down to "content". Beyond the obvious benefits of watching something in a theatre, Scalarama's strategy – programming stuff in unusual venues, with live scores, or as part of apposite double bills and seasons – helps individual films stand out, and gives them a sense of context and stature again. That's how rep should work: airing the catalogue to reoxygenate cinema's bloodstock. Firing people up about cinema history, inspiring them to decide what remains meaningful now. To set agendas, as BFI Southbank does so well.

The idea of cinema as a communal experience finds itself at a strange point when rep is making pleas for its own existence alongside the multiplex, which has been trying for the novelty factor by resurrecting 3D. Immersive ventures such as Secret Cinema also aim to reinvigorate the medium, but as much as they look like the ultimate in congregational cinema, I prefer my rep with more private, contemplative associations.

I'm especially excited to see Phase IV at Scalarama, a 2001-esque brain-scrambler about a hyperevolved ant colony, which I once blundered into on late-night telly. I never expected to see it again, and only learned through the Scalarama programme that it's actually Saul Bass's only directorial credit. I'm hoping for a Proustian rush of teen-cinemania regained from that one; if not, eau-de-flatulence-under-the-bedsheets in full Odorama will do just nicely.