In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla

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      2

      Toward the Dark Cube

      And now let us talk about places of performance.

      Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria

      We don’t sell movies, we sell seats.

      Michael Loew

      Probably no writer has described the movie theatre experience better than Julio Cortázar. The darkness and the silence, the solitude in being part of a crowd, the ecstasy in the presence of the images, the desire to jump into the screen, the impression that you are somewhere else even as you sit among your friends or a group of strangers:

      You go to the movies or the theatre and live your night without thinking about the people who have already gone through the same ceremony, choosing the place and the time, getting dressed and telephoning and row eleven or five, the darkness and the music, territory that belongs to nobody and to everybody there where everybody is a nobody, the men or women in their seats, maybe a word of apology for arriving late, a murmured comment that someone picks up or ignores, almost always silence, looks pouring onto the stage or the screen, fleeing from what’s beside them, from what’s on this side.

      This passage from We Love Glenda So Much offers an excellent starting point for reflecting on the condition of the spectator during the projection of a film, not least because of the novelist’s skill in sketching the dark cube experience through a catalog of such heterogeneous details. Sight, hearing, touch . . . A hypothetical list of the elements characterizing cinematic viewing would not be much more extensive than the one we find in the brilliant opening of Cortázar’s story. In the end, from the spectator’s point of view, there are, in fact, only six truly important features:

      1) Most importantly, the strict separation of the auditorium. The projection happens in a space completely distinct from the world outside, in which the audience is isolated for the duration of the picture. There are obviously practical reasons for this barricade (achieving the darkness needed to produce clearly visible images), but just as many symbolic reasons weigh on such a choice: the public should never forget that it has crossed a threshold and entered into an “other” space requiring absolute dedication until the last words roll off the screen and the lights come back on.

      2) The (almost) total darkness, all the better perceived when we allow ourselves that somewhat estranging pleasure of the matinee only to exit at the end of the film to find that it is no longer daytime. “What hit me on coming out,” Italo Calvino wrote, “was the sense of time having passed, the contrast between two different temporal dimensions, inside and outside the film. I had gone in in broad daylight, and came out to find it dark, the lamp-lit streets prolonging the black-and-white of the screen.” Emergency lighting apart, the dark cube banishes any light source that is not the projector; for this reason, before the massive fire-repellent doors of the modern multiplex (and the rigorous prohibition on entering once the film has started), there was a heavy double curtain that prevented latecomers from disturbing the other spectators by letting light in. “One can’t evade an iris. Round about, blackness; nothing to attract one’s attention,” Jean Epstein commented, in a 1921 essay celebrating the auditorium’s hypnotic power. But let us not forget that light and darkness become language, too: just like at the playhouse, dimming lights tell the audience the show is about to begin, and in many European countries some lights remain on during the pre-film commercials in order to better mark their difference from the movie, which, on the contrary, is to be respectfully appreciated in complete darkness.

      3–4) The spectator’s immobility and silence. Notwithstanding the numerous exceptions to these two principles (especially in the cheap theatres—the historians’ true delight, as we have seen), the movie house’s behavioral code requires patrons to refrain from disturbing one another by moving about or talking. Failing to respect these rules would damage a venue’s reputation, it is understood, and it is in the proprietor’s best interest to discourage such behavior. The manuals that the Hollywood majors distributed to theatre operators in the 1930s recommended absolute inflexibility on this point: ushers needed to keep watch so that no one talked during the show; in the case of infractions, after two warnings, on the third offense violators were to be politely but firmly escorted to the exit.

      5) The large screen size. Though the dimensions range widely from one auditorium to the next, filmed reality is always presented as “larger than life,” even to the extent that a detail of an actor’s face can cover the whole screen. (Generally speaking, screens grew in the 1950s as an effect of the diffusion of panoramic formats, shrank after the arrival of urban multiplexes, and expanded again with the appearance of the suburban multiplex, where space is not an issue.)

      6) The communal (or in any case non-domestic) nature of the cinematic experience. The picture house is accessible to everyone who buys a ticket, and this means that the viewing happens among strangers, usually in seats of parallel rows, even if other formations remain possible, as in the auditoriums that have maintained the old playhouse structure’s side boxes. In any case, at the movies you are in company. Like Cortázar said, it is the “territory that belongs to nobody and to everybody there where everybody is a nobody.”

      As distinct as they seem from one another, all six elements move toward the same goal. This quick list already enables us to see the movie theatre’s particular contribution to the show: it facilitates the aesthetic response to the visual and aural entreaties coming from the screen, and protects the public from distractions. But this is the exact movie theatre that we are acquainted with; in other words, we run the risk that the dark cube’s decisive role in the history of moving-image systems will be made invisible by force of habit. Moviegoers today finds themselves in a position not unlike that of the contemporary art enthusiast who takes for granted the rarified and somewhat icy atmosphere of the gallery because this is the only environment with which he associates an exhibition. The cinema experience is indissolubly connected to these six elements, to such an extent that it seems nearly impossible to distinguish them from technologies of image recording and projection (broadly speaking, even open-air and drive-in theatres follow the same model).

      Yet in reality, things are much different: the place that now seems so “obvious” struggled for twenty or thirty years to establish itself and its particular viewing style worldwide, and it had to contend with a series of alternative solutions, discarded only after a long battle. So, if we truly want to understand the movie theatre’s importance to cinema’s first century (and thus the consequences of its current marginalization, too), we must go back to the 1910s and ’20s, when the adoption of a specific model of architecture and of spectacle went together with a particular idea of the apparatus.

      In this case, the marriage of history and theory can yield pleasant surprises. We have seen how the cinema we know is closely tied to separation from the outside world, to the dark, and to the spectator’s silence and immobility. As Jean Epstein wrote in the early 1920s, “Wrapped in darkness, ranged in cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge as if in a tunnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid.” And yet it was not always that way. The fundamental requisites that today’s audience associate with a movie theatre became a stable fixture at the end of a long process that can be considered complete only СКАЧАТЬ