In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla
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the twentieth century, the auditorium was the true blind spot of film theory. Omnipresent, it remained invisible and unknowable. And yet this blindness coincided only in part with silence about the movie theatre as architectural device. Some critics did ask the question, but then—convinced it had been answered once and for all—hurried on to issues that must have seemed more necessary and urgent: photogenic quality, cinematic language, the relationship of images to physical reality, the power of editing, films’ place in mass culture, the artistic charter of the new discipline . . . The paths they took to incorporate the movie theatre swiftly into reflections on the cinematic apparatus are quite interesting, though; like silences, shortcuts can be instructive—especially in a case like this, where we see a substantial unanimity of vision. It is noteworthy that, here, the main intellectual instrument used to displace the question was the analogy. Instead of beginning with the spectators’ tangible conditions during the film and the way these conditions influence aesthetic reactions, as early as the 1910s film enthusiasts began to ask what a spectator resembled—as if the picture house’s functioning could only be understood through a comparison.
Of the key analogies proposed—essentially two—the first and most famous is that of the cave. In the seventh book of the Republic, Plato had compared the philosopher to a man chained since birth in an underground den. Long convinced that movements projected on the walls of the cavern were the only form of reality, and then having escaped, this man, the story goes, turned back in order to convince his ancient prison companions of the wonders that awaited them outside of the cave, but he received in return only scorn and derision. There are, in fact, some impressive similarities between the cinema experience and Plato’s story, and it is easy to see how the myth immediately became popular among early-twentieth-century film enthusiasts in a society where Latin and Greek classics still constituted a universal cultural reference. The prisoners chained to their seats, the dark, the light at their backs, the silhouettes reproducing the shapes of objects, the wall of the cave where the moving shadows are imprinted; the perfect illusion . . . How to resist the analogy’s charm? How could the idea of men duped, and satisfied, by the pseudo-reality of appearances not remind us of a movie audience (despite the potentially anti-cinematic moral implicit in the Platonic condemnation of any fiction as a copy of a copy, and therefore simply a lie)?
Some probably perceived the risk in presenting spectators as prisoners of a nonexistent world, but the possibility of following Plato must have been too enticing to refuse. In search of a cultural ennobling for cinema, the contributors to film journals of the 1910s and ’20s (the very first to have proposed the image of the cave as an interpretive model for the picture house) had good reason to hope that the classical allusion would offer the newcomer the quarterings of nobility required for admission into the empyrean of the respectable arts. Since then, the danger of providing cinema’s detractors with an argument against it seems to have been of no great concern. On the contrary, the lengthy list of those who, if only in passing, drew on the image of the cave (Edgar Morin, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Vilém Flusser . . .) best confirms the difficulty of doing without the illustrious antecedent. Even Jacques Derrida, in an interview with Cahiers du cinéma in 2001, could not avoid using the same parallel.
Once it was established that the movie theatre reproduced the Platonic cave and that films were able to captivate and deceive spectators with a force of persuasion unknown by any other art, it did not seem necessary to further interrogate the nature, the powers, and the functions of this marvelous engine. All we needed to know about the auditorium was that Plato had in some ways “foreseen” it, not unlike how Leonardo da Vinci had “invented” the tank or the helicopter. In the name of Socrates, Cratylus, and Phaedo, any question could be laid to rest.
It is maybe in part for this reason that the second analogy appeared much later; in its mature form it dates back just to the 1970s, when for the first time—facing the crisis of the traditional circuits—spectators, critics, and directors began to realize that one of the fundamental pieces of the filmic experience as they had known it was disappearing. At the heart of the new theory was the conviction (psychoanalytic in origin, but having taken root enough in common parlance) that this experience is fundamentally like dreaming though we are awake—a condition similar to hypnosis. From here the logic was simple. If going to the movies is equivalent to dreaming, and if indeed there exists a specific relationship between the effects induced by film and by hypnosis (enrapture, the breaking down of barriers, projecting oneself into the picture), the movie theatre cannot help but encourage the spectator’s total relaxation: make him receptive to being kidnapped by the flow of images. The dark, the silence, and the comfortable seats would be all the elements needed to conquer the last resistance of those present, putting them in a state of passivity quite similar to that of a person who sleeps. Exactly as a hypnotic (or psychoanalytical) session has its rituals incorporating metallic pendulums, leather sofas, and commands, to work correctly cinema would also need a precise ceremonial; the auditorium with its darkness, its silence, and its immobility would play a part. The movie palace as gigantic psychoanalytical sofa.
Though the cave analogy remained at a purely intuitive level, its implications never fully developed except by those who used it to revile cinema’s deception outright, the analogy with the dream and hypnosis has a richer history. Less “cultured” (one need not have read Plato, or even Freud, to understand its premises), in the end it offered the only real attempt to explain “scientifically” how viewing conditions influence the spectator during the projection of a film. The credit goes to French critic and novelist Jean-Louis Baudry, who, examining the relationship between dream activity and the cinematic experience, proposed an elaborate theoretical model at the beginning of the 1970s. According to Baudry, who took as his points of departure Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Althusser’s Marxism, cinema’s allure—before that of any single film—lies in the resemblance between the position of the spectator and the mental condition of the infant during the so-called “mirror phase,” when the child produces a first sketch of the idea of “I” while observing his or her own reflection. The physical immaturity of the motor apparatus and the precocious development of the infant’s vision correspond exactly to the experience of the public watching a film. Both are characterized by the dark, the absence of movement, the predominance of viewing over any other activity, the impression that the images are real, and the impossibility of verifying this reality—not to mention the fact that some psychoanalysts describe dreams as images projected on a screen, just as in a film. The desire to relive one’s own infancy with an illusory sense of control over moving pictures would thus be sufficient to explain the twentieth century’s burning passion for the new art. For Baudry, in fact, cinema’s appeal lay entirely in its capacity to transform any audience member into a “transcendental subject,” virtually placed at the center of the universe. From this would stem the medium’s ideological nature—idealizing and potentially conservative—but also its strength and its necessity, if one must read the Platonic myth as a psychic projection of a primitive desire inscribed in the minds of man since the beginning of time.
Baudry’s proposal, taken up by Roland Barthes and Christian Metz, is still quite popular, especially among scholars who include psychoanalysis (not necessarily Lacanian) in their arsenals. Problem solved, then? Absolutely not. Despite the undeniable kinship, there are plenty of reasons to think that neither the cave nor the dream parallel adequately explains what happens in the movie theatre. The problem, of course, is not in the use of analogy; authoritative philosophers have shown that even logic sometimes works through analogic reasoning. However, comparisons can be good or bad, indispensable or completely misleading. Everything depends on their ability to show the similarities of essential elements without being led astray by superficial affinities. And as soon as we look less hastily, the two analogies reveal themselves to be deceitful, that is, built upon dubious consonances.
The American cognitive film theorists—and in particular Noël Carroll—have shown the argumentative fallacies behind the image of the movie theatre as a modern Platonic cave. Unlike the Republic’s prisoners, spectators can always get up and leave, or move their heads; the projected image does not always come from behind the spectators (there is such thing as rear-projection); nothing requires us to read the Platonic myth as the manifestation of an atavistic desire to return to infancy; and so forth. Just as facile, then, is the comparison of a film to dream or hypnosis that is so fundamental to Baudry’s