LITMIR.BIZ

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the world outside had been incomplete. No hushed atmosphere, no select clientele, no promise of social climbing. Regular moviegoers had nothing to do with this culture of distinction. Instead there were the couples making out in the dark; the adolescents who skipped school for a matinee and commented on every single scene; the immigrants who needed someone to translate the silent film placards written in a language they did not yet understand and perhaps never would; the workers who took advantage of the venue’s bathroom for their Sunday toilette . . . This is the world that directors have nostalgically depicted since the 1970s: boisterous, lively, multifaceted, even suspect and illegal, but for all of these reasons also absolutely irresistible. Comprehensibly, this intense social life centering on the picture house has conditioned and continues to condition our idea of twentieth-century cinema. In historians’ accounts, the public always appears invested in every activity but paying attention to what is on screen. Instead of watching the audience during the decisive moment—while it views the film—for the most part we see it daydreaming just before the projection begins, or remembering the movie when the show is all over, and often not even that: as soon as the screen lights up, the scholar’s eye turns elsewhere, wanders through the aisles, infiltrates the administrative offices, or escapes to the foyer, in search of new adventures.

      Here remains a gap to be filled. Fascinated by moviegoing as an occasion for meeting and socializing, historians have looked at the auditorium as a place where one does everything but watch a film; a place saturated with lives and passions, and precisely for this reason so intriguing; a little microcosm where, almost by chance and as an accessory activity, someone projects a movie. It is not difficult to see why this happened. Focusing on empirical audiences was a way to dismantle the abstractions of Baudry’s, Barthes’s, and Metz’s psychoanalytic models and give space to the plurality of experience that theory seemed to want to erase with a single stroke of its pen; differences existed, and it was necessary to deal with them even at the cost of an abrupt shift toward the social history that would once again obscure the aesthetic problematic. But are we sure that we still ought to talk today of the movie house in the same essentially legendary terms as do Amarcord and The Last Picture Show? The end of the movie theatre epoch and the beginning of a new spectatorial regime make a rethinking of such convictions urgent. If the human heat surrounding that which we might call “the dark cube” or “the opaque cube” (according to a poetic definition by Barthes) has completely monopolized the critics’ attention, generating the equivocation by which the house is studied more as the intersection of histories than as an aesthetic technology or meaning-making machine, it is time to correct this distorted vision, or at least supplement it with a new perspective. We need a Copernican revolution that will refocus the terms of the debate.

      In the twentieth century the movie theatre was not a chaotic place of socialization, but a steely modernist device—or rather, it was not one more than the other (even if, as we will see, its origins date back at least four centuries). No less than the art gallery, the auditorium represented an “other” space, carefully distinguished from the world in which we live our normal lives. And just as the white walls and the lights eventually began to seem important to art historians, from now on the auditorium will have to be studied first and foremost as an aesthetic technology designed to encourage the spectator’s concentration.

      No one, perhaps, has affirmed the conventional nature of the movie theatre’s protocol as clearly as Peter Greenaway:

      Cinema is like an elaborate game with rules. The aim of the game is to successfully suspend disbelief. The audience has been well trained over some eighty years of practice. Necessary circumstances are darkness and a bright projection bulb and a screen. The audience agree to enter a dark space and sit facing in one direction. They will be prepared to sit for some two hours—usually in the evenings.

      Greenaway’s comment could be further developed, highlighting, for example, the spectator’s increased willingness to remain immobile in the dark on the weekend, or the often decisive function that the evening show has occupied in the first dates of new couples (cinema as aphrodisiac of the masses?). But what really counts here is the estrangement of the gaze that enables us to observe the cinematic liturgy as something not at all obvious—a social practice that today seems self-evident only because we have been habituated to it since infancy, in this respect truly similar to the experience of Plato’s prisoners. Culture disguised as nature: exactly like the art gallery of immaculate walls and sparkling parquet.

      The timelines are not even very far apart. Just like the movie theatre, the gallery, at least in its current form, is a fairly recent institution, more or less the child of impressionism. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did the austere and somewhat aristocratic space we know today emerge, definitively wiping out the eighteenth-century picture galleries with their tendency to amass paintings of very different sizes, periods, artists, subjects, and qualities alongside one other. It is not so strange, then, that the golden age of the “white cube” coincided with the most glorious season of the “dark cube”: from the 1920s until the 1970s, when artists increasingly profaned the gallery’s codes and confines, as everyone began to perceive the entirely conventional nature of the setting. From Yves Klein to Joseph Kosuth, from Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Maurizio Cattelan, a whole current of contemporary art has worked to demystify the exhibition space and its sacred aura.

      The coincidence is not without import. Indeed, just as today some propose that we see in the gallery the greatest realization of artistic modernism, we can ask if something similar should not be said with regard to the movie theatre—if, in other words, in the eyes of future generations, it will not be the seats in parallel rows and the oversized screen that were the true core of twentieth-century cinema, far more than directors’ styles, generic conventions, or national schools. Obviously, aesthetic devices like the gallery and the auditorium do not change the works of art they host, but they can influence, even quite profoundly, the visitors’ or viewers’ reactions to them; they impose, in other words, a precise style of viewing and of listening. Reformulated in these terms, even the question of the relationship that exists between La Dolce Vita projected in large format and its video versions viewed at home acquires new interest. While we cannot talk about difference in the terms we do for a print with respect to its original painting, for two editions of the same book, or for two performances of the same song, any notion of perfect identicalness is likewise inapplicable.

      The response will always inevitably be twofold: yes, the film on TV is substantially the same as the one we see at the theatre; no, the experience of the film is not identical because different aesthetic devices differently condition our attitude toward the work. As a result, the small screen cannot be treated as simply a downgraded dark cube, almost as if it were merely a question of degree—of better or worse—with respect to an ever-unattainable ideal of the image’s absolute presence.

      The need to study the conditions in which a work of art is presented to its public does not obviously only regard moving images. There is an unbridgeable distance between a Francesco Petrarch sonnet read quietly in private and the same sonnet sounded in a theatre by a great actor’s voice, even when not a comma has been altered (never mind the possibility that it might be sung to a Claudio Monteverdi tune); but the same could be said for a play (silent reading, staged reading, dress rehearsal, full production . . .) or for a piece of music, as dancing a waltz by Strauss involves a participation and a pleasure very different from listening to it while relaxing in an armchair. The words of the play text or the notes of a piece of music remain the same, but it would be hard to speak of an identical experience. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, discussing a similar problem, “the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out . . . because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”

      However, it is with moving images that such an approach proves particularly fruitful, due to the contrast between the fixity of an infinitely reproducible work and the multiplicity of responses to it (which are connected to its presentation). To speak of viewing and listening styles thus means forgetting the sterile contraposition of good sense—which says that a film on the small screen should not be fundamentally different from the same film seen at the theatre—with the certainty, not just of the most demanding cinephiles, that between the two experiences an irreducible distance nonetheless remains.

      This

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