In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla

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СКАЧАТЬ covered the same decades in which the art gallery enjoyed an unmatched prestige—from the 1920s to the beginning of the 1970s—is to exclude at least a quarter-century, if the count begins with the Lumière brothers’ first public projection on December 28, 1895 at the Café des Capucines in Paris. Just like the art gallery, it was only little by little—adjustment by adjustment and correction by correction—that a single standard was established: the white cube or the black cube, the completely empty room or the rows of seats, light from above or absolute darkness.

      Before this happened, before the creation of a space expressly designed to host projections, the film experience was something quite different. Luckily, contemporary accounts give us a good idea of what it meant to see a movie for the first few decades of the last century. Still in the 1920s, when the movie theatre as we know it was just one of many hypotheses, it was not unusual for a journalist to dedicate half of his article to the merits, defects, and peculiarities of a theatre rather than to the film of the day. It is thus entertaining to discover the pioneers of film criticism as they classify the setting according to the public it served, the orchestra’s energy, or the attendants’ politeness; as they castigate the other customers’ less than impeccable manners; or as they comment with impressive competence on the quality of the drinks, or maybe the comfort of the seats (the leather padding or the rough wooden benches), the cleanliness, and the service. Entertaining, but above all instructive, because their words give us a better idea of the conditions under which a film was projected in those very first years, when anything and everything was still possible.

      It is worth quoting at least one example at length:

      The Winter Garden at Antwerp is a nice place. Should we call it a café-concert? Should we call it a movie house? When you enter, it’s hard to know for sure if you’re among a crowd of earnest schoolgirls or in a music hall. Both, I think. But it is lovely; the room never ends and it has six long parallel rows of tables that remind you of a wedding banquet. You drink, the music makes an infernal racket (in proportion!). Smartly uniformed ushers hurry the spectators along; it doesn’t smell bad, and it’s ventilated. The ticket for this paradoxical place costs twenty cents.

      Thus wrote Louis Delluc (along with Jean Epstein, a future leading cineaste of the French Impressionist Cinema of the 1920s) in an article dated July 8, 1919, in the euphoria of the first months of peace after the close of the Great War. The sounds, the colors, and the odors of the Winter Garden will surprise a non-specialist reader today first and foremost because they furnish an idea of cinematic conviviality extremely distant from our own, where the film constitutes just one of the various ingredients of the entertainment—perhaps not even the most important one.

      And yet the Winter Garden is hardly exceptional, as the pages of any journalist of the period—not just Delluc—would lead us to conclude. There is the Marivaux in Paris, with its British dancers and their acrobatic numbers; there is the movie house on the Avenue de la Gare, in Nice, with a bar so illuminated there does not seem light enough left for the projector; or the Majestic at Nîmes, so much like a “well-run garage”—a talented projectionist, drinking binges, the Catholics separated from the Protestants and the French from the Spanish. Or, finally, there is the auditorium on Paris’s rue de la Roquette, the algid temple of the new art that sought to imitate those already in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and Amsterdam, which more closely resemble the spaces familiar to us today.

      Delluc’s articles describe a situation not only French: at the beginning of the 1920s there still was no single viewing style for films, and in the large majority of cases the silence and order of our movie theatres was as yet very far off. A broad range of solutions remained open, though it is important to note that places like the one on the rue de la Roquette represented an exception. If Delluc described the picture house as an eminently promiscuous environment, this term should be understood first in the sense that many very different and often opposed functions were brought together in a single space: part restaurant, part bordello, part theatre, and a touch of the fair. For this reason, it is not only the Winter Garden that seems a “paradoxical place,” but each and every early picture house: sanctuary of images and noisy multicolored cavea with its contrasting vocations, between heaven and hell. “It has affinities with both church and alcove,” English architectural connoisseur Philip Morton Shand would write in 1930, with a touch of irony toward the sumptuous electicism of the new movie palaces. But above all, thanks to Delluc, we realize that, before the movie theatre’s triumph, seeing the film was not necessarily the main reason to go to the cinema; the pleasure of the unknown and the not always upright reputation of the men and women who frequented it must have played an important role in the effusive passion for the new art: elements that, if anything, made it even more captivating, as cinephiles of the 1910s and ’20s made abundantly clear.

      We get a sense of what this plebian and itinerant cinema was like if we turn Delluc’s observations about the Winter Garden inside out. For each of his points of praise we can imagine the slightly disturbing reality of its opposite: nasty odors, lack of ventilation, equivocal encounters, uncomfortable seats. But more importantly, when it comes to a discussion of the auditorium as aesthetic device, what strikes us is its radically different viewing conditions from those of cinema’s classical age. Of the six elements characterizing cinematic viewing style, in fact, only screen size and the collective projections (points five and six) seem guaranteed in the case of the first picture houses:

      1) No separation from the outside world. On the contrary, we have an open space where people wander freely, setting their own rhythm for the evening’s entertainment, moving from one area to the other, breaking up the viewing of the film with other activities. Such behavior is encouraged by the program’s extreme brevity and by the alternation of live and recorded performances.

      2) No absolute darkness—a condition that in places like the Winter Garden seems neither attainable nor, to tell the truth, always desirable. Even without addressing the light needed by the members of the orchestra to read their music (when there is no player piano), newspapers of the period often speak of rose-colored lights kept on during the show to avoid a complete darkness that would have keep more timid types away.

      3–4) No quiet and immobility on the part of the spectators. At the Winter Garden, as in many theatres, it is perfectly normal for those who watch the show to do other things simultaneously—eat, drink, chit-chat. Most importantly, spectators do not deliver themselves to silence (rather, as we gather from Delluc, it is quite probable that music and voices fill the room), partly because they do not always sit in straight lines facing the screen, as there are small tables for holding drinks and snacks, commonly arranged in rows emanating out from the center, in a semi-circle.

      As soon as we consider the conditions of cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century—a technical marvel with an at best dubious artistic stature, like the X-ray—the reasons for this anarchy are clear. Perfectly contemporaneous, the discoveries of the Lumière brothers and the Curies were often paired in theatrical posters and newspaper reports as must-see modern wonders: the life of shadows and the mystery of fluorescence alongside the bearded lady and elephant man (as David Lynch well understood, Elephant Man being one of his many films about cinema and its tricks). This uncertainty surely did not help to set a single standard. Still lacking a space expressly dedicated to projections, movies were forced to seek hospitality elsewhere, and it was perfectly normal that they wound up leaning on other, often older kinds of spectacle, and being conditioned by them. The “cinema,” each time, was where the projector was: in a café or a temporarily empty garage, under a circus tent, at a fair, on an improvised vaudeville stage. This precarious condition recalls the medieval theatre, when, in the absence of a special building for performances, it was up to the actors to “theatricalize” the spaces of daily life through their presence, and a show could be held just about anywhere—on a street corner as in a market square, in the aisles of a church, or on a platform erected for the occasion in a palace courtyard.

      Theatre’s nomadic conditions before the codification of an architectural place of performance naturally involved a tremendous willingness to adjust to СКАЧАТЬ