In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla
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of distinct aesthetic devices, from the playhouse and the picture palace to television and individual media. The concept of viewing style—fundamental to this unitary history—also helps explain why the effects of the movie theatre’s crisis appeared so belatedly. The canonical date of the landing of films in American homes is usually set at 1956, when the Hollywood majors closed the first important contract with the national networks ceding broadcast rights for black-and-white films produced before 1948. It could have been a revolution; instead, from that moment on the spilling over of the most successful films from the big to the small screen produced no decisive change in the audience’s behavior. For a generation or two, the theatre remained the only “normal” way to see a movie. Those who stayed at home tried to re-create the viewing conditions a picture house would have guaranteed. Lights were turned out; armchairs were placed at the right distance; someone unplugged the telephone so as not to be interrupted—during what represented a still rather exceptional event, given the limited number of showings and broadcast hours of the early years. We will have a chance to return to this problem, but what is important here is that the cinematic viewing model was so strong as to be exported even in the absence of some of the elements most characteristic of the movie theatre.
Today this relationship has been turned on its head. At just over a century since the construction of the first buildings designed to host the Lumière brothers’ invention, what seems to have entered into crisis once and for all is the particular viewing style encouraged by the auditorium but so prestigious and pervasive as to be adopted elsewhere, when spectators have to resign themselves and attend a film without all of the comforts of a panoramic screen or a perfectly darkened room. If in the 1950s and ’60s (but later, too) men and women watching a movie continued to behave as if they were at a picture house, regardless of the viewing conditions, today the opposite seems to be true: the movie theatre is the anomaly—the infraction of a norm and an aesthetic practice that find their codification in the domestic space.
But let us avoid any misunderstandings. To say that the age of the movie theatre is coming to an end is much different from prophesying its complete disappearance—an event that seems neither imminent nor even probable. Simply put, while the auditorium incarnated the optimal filmic experience, since at least the 1970s the monopoly of the cinematic viewing style has entered, little by little, into crisis. The picture house was first surrounded by television and then by multiple supports in competition among themselves, to such an extent that none of them can hope for the exclusivity that the movie theatres once had. In light of this phenomenon, the fact that for some years the number of venues and the volume of box office takings (but not the number of spectators) has started to grow again in the Western world is in the end an irrelevant detail. It took a few post-cinematic generations for television to escape once and for all from the tutelage of its older brother—cinema. Only in the final quarter of the last century did the new arrival enter maturity and truly begin to assert its autonomy. Actually, the process is ongoing, but the signals of an acceleration multiply, and with the fall of the movie theatre as a viewing paradigm, soon nothing will be as it was before.
The auditorium’s slow decline brings with it the irreversible decay of one model of spectatorship; and, in a chain reaction, the disappearance of this spectator—which we might call “classical”—produces a radically selective memory of bygone cinema. We have all had the painful experience of discovering those films revered in our memories that on the small screen just do not “cut it.” Since all of the reinforcements concocted for movies disappear at home, we are no longer surprised that so few films really hold up to the video test; and yet, with the exception of Serge Daney, few critics have explored the effects of cinema’s forced domestication. On video, dark photography becomes indecipherable; crowd scenes lose any epic power; the spatial composition of panoramic formats like cinemascope is completely distorted. Never mind the stylistic choices whose meanings change when they pass from the big to the small screen, like the close-up, which today—after all the abuses of the shot/reverse shot on television—is difficult to still define as the “soul of cinema,” as Jean Epstein did in the 1920s: a sort of explosion in the continuity of a film, a wrinkling of the story, where the camera’s approach to objects was never gratuitous, but indicated a discovery, an emotional climax, an epiphany. There is no doubt that in the years to come the rethinking of the canon will be determined partly by old films’ differing ability to adapt to the new medium.
Twentieth-century directors conceived of their films imagining them projected under very precise conditions; those conditions having disappeared, these works will suffer from the demise of the device for which they were originally envisioned. Every art continuously creates and recreates its past; but when it comes to cinema, the big screen’s crisis not only accelerates this process, but also reshapes our appreciation of each movie. We need to think of twentieth-century cinema as an animal in an ecosystem; cast out of that ecosystem, films must either adapt to the new environment, survive in little protective enclaves (cineforums and national cinemathèques), or simply die out. But surely, for all of them, natural selection is already underway with a violence that is unprecedented, perhaps excluding only the passage from silent films to the talkies—when it became normal for movies to “speak,” and those that did not were quickly condemned to oblivion.
Even if today only a tiny portion of moving images are consumed according to the rigorous behavioral code that characterizes the dark cube, that device was the secret engine of twentieth-century cinema. And yet, precisely because we prepare to leave that season behind, it is far more certain that, without the movie theatre as we knew it, film history would be completely different—just as the movies of the past have begun to seem different, very different, since the small screen has begun to erode the auditorium’s centrality. Despite appearances, the cinematic viewing style’s decline has relatively little to do with our past—nostalgia for the lost Saturday night or Sunday afternoon movie ritual, the mournful cries of cinephiles for every old theatre reopened as a gym or mall, the establishment of an enduring canon. Rather, to think about the movie theatre today is to ask very precise questions about the future of moving images. While competition from television by now seems an ancient phenomenon requiring no further analysis, the change we are witnessing is something without precedent, and relates to the spectator’s comprehensive attitude toward moving pictures—wherever they are.
This story coming to a close, another immediately opens up. Because the movie theatre has such a profound impact on directors’ works and styles, it would certainly be surprising if its eclipse and the consequent transition from the age of cinematography to that of individual media (the disc player, the computer, the videophone . . .) did not bring with them major repercussions. This is our present, and to reconstruct the vicissitudes of the dark cube in its first century of life means principally to investigate this epochal metamorphosis just as it is happening.
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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