In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla
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an anthology of protests against the degradation films suffer on the small screen; such a volume would unite a large number of the last century’s great directors, from John Ford (“Your name is on it, but it isn’t the thing you did”) to David Cronenberg (“The versions of The Dead Zone and The Fly that you find on video carry my name, and they are the films that I made, but I hate the way they look on tape. Too bright”). Generations of cinephiles—those who always specify that, alas, they saw this or that film only on TV—have insisted on a radical difference between the two media. But today such attitudes seem, at the very least, outmoded. The technological gap no longer seems reason enough to divide into pieces a world of moving images that is already perceived as a whole in everyday life. The purism of the big screen’s champions and their almost religious cult of the movie theatre seem to have been vanquished by the common sense of the man on the street, who has never wondered whether La Dolce Vita on TV might be truly, deeply different from La Dolce Vita at the movies. Or perhaps it is the victory of the empiricism of Hollywood’s tycoons, who from the start essentially saw the upstart box as a tool for recycling and converting older films—potentially the vastest distribution system of all time—and were only divided on the strategies of commercial exploitation. That it was these same people who tried to counteract the fall in ticket sales by adding something new to the big screen (color, panoramic format, 3-D, and stereo sound), as if they were reiterating the superiority of the movie theatre, is maybe the best confirmation that the average spectator was already little inclined to distinguish between the two viewing experiences.
Today the ritual of moviegoing still exists, but it represents just one of countless varieties of image-consumption; in fact, the possibility of comparing these variations allows us better to appreciate the superior technical quality of a modern multiplex. While directors of the old guard, like Chris Marker (“On television, you can see the shadow of a film, the trace of a film, the nostalgia, the echo of a film, but never the film”) or Jean Eustache (“You can discover a film only at the movie theatre”) were certain that there was a precise hierarchy, since the days of their youth there has been a decisive metamorphosis in the public’s attitude toward films. Given their constant multiplication, the means of image-reproduction have never been so unimportant, and even the movie theatre’s prestige among moving-image systems seems destined for the list of twentieth-century fetishes we are preparing to bid farewell to once and for all. It is only a matter a time.
The seeds of this situation were sown long ago—very long ago if we measure the last forty years against the rather brief history of moving images, from Edison and Lumière onward. As an irreversible phenomenon, the picture house crisis dates back at least to the blight of the 1960s and ’70s, when in about a decade—both in Europe and the United States—most of the neighborhood locales that assured the dissemination of movies throughout smaller urban centers forever closed their doors. In a single blow, an entire world seemed to vanish into nothing. More directors have told this story than anyone, even if not a few novelists or critics have brought to life the experience of a long militancy of “film eaters,” as Italian critic and screenwriter Enzo Ungari called them. The never-ending discoveries of the movie theatre, its erotic energy, its unconventional (and thus all the more fascinating) audiences, the attraction/repulsion of the darkness . . . and yet, despite the wonderful pages of writers like Italo Calvino, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Leonardo Sciascia, or of critics like Serge Daney and Ungari, it is above all directors who have taken inspiration from this decisive transformation. It is certainly no coincidence that, in just a few years, many very different cineastes (but with a striking predominance of Italians) felt the need to pay a melancholy-tinged homage to the cinema of their youth. From Peter Bogdanovich to Federico Fellini, from Giuseppe Tornatore to Ettore Scola, from Joe Dante to Marco Ferreri, the nostalgic evocation of the kaleidoscopic world that revolved around the picture house, with its incredible characters and their picaresque adventures, has become a subgenre of art-house films. Cinema was on the verge of leaving us, but its devotees could still celebrate, one last time, its past grandeur.
Today these films seem still too closely tied to the world of the movie house for their creators to have fully realized what this loss would eventually mean. To be fair, this is not even really what interested them. Their gaze was uniquely turned toward the past: the regret, the elegy of the good old days, and the mourning understandably got the better of the rest. The acute sense of debasement, dramatic as it was, disguised the outcome of the metamorphoses underway even when some of these directors felt the need to interrogate seriously the significance and the future repercussions of the entire process.
The intensification of the crisis and the thirty or twenty or ten years since play in our favor. Now that TV has been joined by new and stronger competitors, and cinema’s marginalization within a big family of moving images seems complete, it is simply impossible to defer the question any longer. Or rather, the question has come into focus on its own—as if now, in the face of the ineluctable eclipse of the movie theatre, the stakes have suddenly become clearer.
Before the picture house had serious rivals, when going there was the only “correct” way to view a film, it was impossible to ask what role it played in the reception of movies—to ask, for example, what it meant for people during the twentieth century to attend a show sitting properly in the dark among strangers, and how such a practice influenced cinematic style. For quite some time the movie camera and the projector attracted all of the attention, leaving the theatre itself to fade into the background as less significant than those devices (which critics conventionally call the “apparatus”). The reflections of a small number of architects excepted, the movie theatre has remained the great lacuna in twentieth-century film theory.
Things changed as soon as technological innovations began to offer a wide range of possibilities and moving images were liberated from the picture house’s constraints. Precisely because it has been openly challenged, the movie theatre suddenly appears right before our eyes. Only now that the frame has shed its false naturalness, thanks to the competition of new media, are we able to see it as an artificial construction that was perfected over the course of decades. It is perhaps the first time that we can fix our gaze on the movie theatre as a key institution of twentieth-century art.
Let me be clear on one point. To speak today of the picture house and its golden age, essentially from the 1920s to the 1970s, is not simply to engage in a sterile historiographical exercise. Without the movie house—without its architecture, its symbols, its behavioral codes, its rituals—the history of the seventh art would not be the one we know. But this means above all that, following the auditorium’s decline, the style of films will change as well, and with it possibly the type of pleasure and aesthetic experience sought from moving images. Divested of the big screen, cinema of the future will inevitably be different from what we have had until now. As will its spectators.
In such situations, as ever, new opportunities arise and old truths are called into question. This is already happening. But, precisely because the signals coming from television and video are so contradictory, getting a clear focus on the frame—i.e. the preconditions of any given work—will help us to orient ourselves in a Janus-faced present where the old and new coexist. Anamnesis, diagnosis, and prognosis for once seem perfectly intertwined. The presence (of yesterday) and the absence (of tomorrow) can no longer be disentangled; so the gaze of the archeologist, who seeks to bring a lost experience back to life, meets that of the soothsayer, who gathers the clues of a still-undetermined future. In our historical position, any question about the movie theatre instantly involves a parallel query about its disappearance, and about a system of the arts in which the big screen has permanently abdicated its time-honored centrality. When we stop going to the movies—or go feeling as if we are doing something exceptional, as when we get decked out for the opera—films will no longer be the same. And now just one thing is certain: seen from the past (from the movie theatre’s golden age, which we have already left behind), the future suddenly looks closer.
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The Cave and the Mirror
To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Everybody says, “You go to the movies to dream.” That’s a load of crap. In the outskirts, you went to the movies to