In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla
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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 guaranteed that the theatre’s doors would throw themselves open to reveal a whole other world.
In the end, even the enemies of “theme” buildings, supporters of a severe but not inelegant rationalism, underscored the uniqueness of the movie theatre in the urban space through a refusal of the traditional composite language, sometimes flanking the main body with a showy vertical structure, as in the most celebrated German movie houses of the 1920s, from the Universum to the Titania-Palast of Berlin, and later in the buildings of the British Odeon chain. This was a confirmation that—either through the combination of heterogeneous styles or instead through the elimination of extraneous detail—the dark cube needed to mark itself off unequivocally as an out-of-the-ordinary space, governed by laws and principles to which the audience needed to submit itself as soon as it crossed the threshold.
The history of twentieth-century cinema is also the history of this place and its precepts. As we have seen, the world of before, the world of the fairground cinema and cine-variety—permeable and vital—would disappear neither overnight nor without opposition or regrets. It was finally Al Jolson’s voice in The Jazz Singer that would decree the end of the cinematic conviviality described by Delluc and other journalists of the epoch. October 6, 1927, naturally, can only be a symbolic date; and yet there is little doubt that, thanks to the advent of the sound film, in just a few years the early cinema’s viewing style would be outmoded. The innovators’ battle to regiment the public was long, but eventually won: a laborious process some ten years in the making was finally crowned sovereign when spectators were prohibited from moving and speaking during the film—not unlike what had happened in the playhouse. “Almost always silence”: from that moment on, it would be imperative for the audience to watch only the images and nothing else, so that, as Cortázar has told us, looks could pour “onto the stage or the screen, fleeing from what’s beside them, from what’s on this side.” The dark cube’s epoch had begun.
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Vitruvius’s Sons
It so happens that human life in all its aspects, wide or narrow, is so intimately connected with architecture, that with a certain amount of observation we can usually reconstruct a bygone society from the remains of its public monuments. From relics of household stuff, we can imagine its owners “in their habit as they lived.”
Honoré de Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute
As to the visual elements, the stage designer has a more powerful art at his disposal than the poet.
Aristotle, The Poetics
Through the definitive institutionalization of the dark cube, the history of the gaze came to know a rare moment of discontinuity. No expression we choose for the great caesura produced by the advent of the picture house (revolution? paradigm shift? rebirth?) could exaggerate the importance of the drift from one kind of spectator to another. Suddenly, going to