In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla

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СКАЧАТЬ cinema as well. At the beginning of the century—when the program changed according to the location and occasion in which the film was being shown—vaudeville and fairground theatres, cafés, and circuses not only gave hospitality to the projection, but also decisively influenced the audience’s reaction. Condemned to maximum versatility, the early cinema had no choice but to be absorbed by a larger show and, above all, to be contaminated by less demanding forms of entertainment. In the 1920s, films would have a lot to be forgiven for, as cinema struggled to be counted among the respectable disciplines, on the same level as music or literature—so much so that avant-garde directors’ insistence on the concept of “pure cinema” (an entirely cinematic cinema, completely freed of its borrowings from the sister arts) seems the natural correlate to the desire to cleanse films of contact with all that was impure.

      Only the picture house’s institutionalization put an end to this long and sometimes uneasy cohabitation. It is for this reason that the birth of a cinematic viewing style and of the “classical spectator” should not be separated from the attempt finally to offer the projector a room of its own. According to historians, the first buildings constructed as regular venues for projections date back to 1906–07—even if each country has its own chronology, and in Europe they tried to restructure pre-existing spaces whenever possible, especially in the city center. The big step was in any case already taken. With entirely new or partially modified architectural spaces, cinema had ceased to be a guest and could finally set the rules of the game in absolute freedom—invent for itself a viewing style that fully corresponded not only to what it was, but primarily to what it planned to become. This process was well described by Giuseppe Lavini in a 1918 article for L’architettura italiana: “The new institutions install themselves in suitable environments: then bit by bit as they take on their own shape, as they consolidate their own existence and establish the particulars of their functions, they set themselves up in buildings that have their own special form.”

      Some habits that the public contracted in the first years of the century would endure for quite a while. We know, for example, that, until the rise of the talkie, English spectators continued to divide themselves between the orchestra and balconies according to a convention typical of the music hall: those who planned to enjoy just a half-hour of entertainment watched from the orchestra, while those who intended to stay the entire evening went upstairs. However, with the birth of a place expressly conceived for movies, the hard part was already done. The compromises over, the solidarities of yesteryear renounced, compulsory cohabitation brought to an end, for cinema there suddenly opened a myriad of opportunities that had been unimaginable just a few years before.

      Naturally, not even the dark cube came out of nowhere. Alongside the embarrassing relatives, others were, quite the contrary, worth keeping in contact with. The prose theatre that had so often generously hosted the first movie projections was one of these, and it should not come as a surprise that the architects charged with building a home for movies immediately adopted the playhouse as an obvious point of reference. Behind this choice, to be sure, there were precise technical motivations. Like the movie theatre, the “Italian playhouse”—which with its rigorous perspectival principles, rigid separation of stage and house, and framing of actors within the proscenium box is still the most diffuse type of theatrical building—placed its spectators directly facing the stage, and many of its schemes could be applied to the newcomer without effort. The proposal was successful, and the movie house’s structure derives more or less from that model. However, excessive familiarity with the buildings born from this encounter must not lead us to take for granted the solution that won out, obscuring the importance but also the dramatic nature of the movies’ exodus from “improvised viewing places” to “specialized structures” (terms that recall the passage from the outdoor, ambulatory spectacles of the Middle Ages to the first modern theatres).

      No part of this process was easy or banal. On the contrary, the theatricalization of the venues must certainly be seen as part of a broader strategy of repositioning within the system of the arts, no less than were the analogy with the Platonic cave, or the adoption of classicizing formulae like “tenth muse” or “seventh art” to allude to cinema. It is quite probable, for instance, that the subdivision of seating by price range and the adoption of some architectural conventions of the past that were useless in the new context, like the curtain and the proscenium, served to make films seem familiar to the new, predominantly female and bourgeois, public. Siegfried Kracauer, moreover, had noted as far back as 1927 how the movie theatre’s architectural frame was an integral part of a similar gentrification of cinema, and for this reason that it tended to “emphasize a dignity that used to inhabit the institutions of high culture. It favors the lofty and the sacred as if designed to promote works of eternal significance.”

      All of this is true. However, we must remember that the auditorium’s principal objective was to impose on the audience a new attitude toward movies. The prose theatre meant a bourgeois public, but chiefly it meant particular viewing conditions. And it was here that architects’ expertise came into play. The early cinema had been anything but a dark box, protected by the outside world and rigorously controlled in terms of its etiquette, which spectators from that moment on learned to associate with the idea of cinema. And yet it is only against the backdrop of this joyful chaos that we can understand the obsession with order and discipline that would spread in the following years. A bodiless eye, receptive to the stream of images, now had to take the place of the eros, the fear, and the desire that once lurked there in the darkness. Imitating the theatre, the dark cube in fact aspired to propose itself as a place of absolute aesthetic experience that allowed only one legitimate activity: the contemplation of a film.

      The first task was to bar the doors to the chaos of the world outside; the rest would spontaneously follow. If spectators were going to watch the movie of the day with the same attention they gave to a live comedy or drama, it was essential that nothing prevented them from doing so. For this reason, the separation had to be both symbolic and real. Throughout the 1910s and ’20s, movie professionals incessantly repeated the need to signal the border between the auditorium and the world outside. The point emerges almost obsessively in architects’ writings and in press releases issued upon the opening of this or that picture palace. Indeed, we can hardly find a designer who did not insist upon the need for a majestic entrance that would psychologically prepare the spectator for the movie theatre’s imaginary world. Nor do we lack detailed analyses of the psychological consequences of the wait for a film to begin. The most common strategy would, however, remain that of marking the separation from the outside world through luxury and extravagance, following the motto of American architect Charles Lee, designer of over 250 picture houses between 1920 and 1951: “The show starts on the sidewalk.”

      Neo-Greek, neo-Roman and neo-Egyptian, fake Venetian and fake Mexican, or fake Chinese and fake Indian: except for the neo-Gothic (too austere, and in Anglo-Saxon countries too tied to church and university architecture), any unusual style would do as long as it clearly told potential spectators that, crossing the threshold, they would enter an exotic land. As another American architect, Thomas Lamb, wrote,

      To make our audience receptive and interested, we must cut them off from the rest of the city life and take them into a rich and self-contained auditorium, where their minds are freed from the usual occupations and freed from their customary thoughts. In order to do this, it is necessary to present to their eyes a general scheme quite different from their daily environment, quite different in color scheme, and a great deal more elaborate.

      At least until the 1929 stock market crash, there was no expedient or solution that architects had not tried in order to highlight this programmatic exceptionality: pilasters, windows, and towers accentuating the façade’s verticality; imposing terracotta statues; monumental staircases; balustrades. And further: red carpets; chandeliers; bas-reliefs in a blaze of stuccos, marbles, and velvets, because nothing was too much if the objective was to stupefy the public and remind them that the movies had nothing to do with everyday life. The difference was to jump out at them, immediately. It hardly mattered that modernist architects and intellectuals derided the movie palace’s “barbarous and suffocating magnificence,” if hybridity and stylistic hodgepodge СКАЧАТЬ