1) Most importantly, the strict separation of the auditorium. The projection happens in a space completely distinct from the world outside, in which the audience is isolated for the duration of the picture. There are obviously practical reasons for this barricade (achieving the darkness needed to produce clearly visible images), but just as many symbolic reasons weigh on such a choice: the public should never forget that it has crossed a threshold and entered into an “other” space requiring absolute dedication until the last words roll off the screen and the lights come back on.
2) The (almost) total darkness, all the better perceived when we allow ourselves that somewhat estranging pleasure of the matinee only to exit at the end of the film to find that it is no longer daytime. “What hit me on coming out,” Italo Calvino wrote, “was the sense of time having passed, the contrast between two different temporal dimensions, inside and outside the film. I had gone in in broad daylight, and came out to find it dark, the lamp-lit streets prolonging the black-and-white of the screen.” Emergency lighting apart, the dark cube banishes any light source that is not the projector; for this reason, before the massive fire-repellent doors of the modern multiplex (and the rigorous prohibition on entering once the film has started), there was a heavy double curtain that prevented latecomers from disturbing the other spectators by letting light in. “One can’t evade an iris. Round about, blackness; nothing to attract one’s attention,” Jean Epstein commented, in a 1921 essay celebrating the auditorium’s hypnotic power. But let us not forget that light and darkness become language, too: just like at the playhouse, dimming lights tell the audience the show is about to begin, and in many European countries some lights remain on during the pre-film commercials in order to better mark their difference from the movie, which, on the contrary, is to be respectfully appreciated in complete darkness.
3–4) The spectator’s immobility and silence. Notwithstanding the numerous exceptions to these two principles (especially in the cheap theatres—the historians’ true delight, as we have seen), the movie house’s behavioral code requires patrons to refrain from disturbing one another by moving about or talking. Failing to respect these rules would damage a venue’s reputation, it is understood, and it is in the proprietor’s best interest to discourage such behavior. The manuals that the Hollywood majors distributed to theatre operators in the 1930s recommended absolute inflexibility on this point: ushers needed to keep watch so that no one talked during the show; in the case of infractions, after two warnings, on the third offense violators were to be politely but firmly escorted to the exit.
5) The large screen size. Though the dimensions range widely from one auditorium to the next, filmed reality is always presented as “larger than life,” even to the extent that a detail of an actor’s face can cover the whole screen. (Generally speaking, screens grew in the 1950s as an effect of the diffusion of panoramic formats, shrank after the arrival of urban multiplexes, and expanded again with the appearance of the suburban multiplex, where space is not an issue.)
6) The communal (or in any case non-domestic) nature of the cinematic experience. The picture house is accessible to everyone who buys a ticket, and this means that the viewing happens among strangers, usually in seats of parallel rows, even if other formations remain possible, as in the auditoriums that have maintained the old playhouse structure’s side boxes. In any case, at the movies you are in company. Like Cortázar said, it is the “territory that belongs to nobody and to everybody there where everybody is a nobody.”
As distinct as they seem from one another, all six elements move toward the same goal. This quick list already enables us to see the movie theatre’s particular contribution to the show: it facilitates the aesthetic response to the visual and aural entreaties coming from the screen, and protects the public from distractions. But this is the exact movie theatre that we are acquainted with; in other words, we run the risk that the dark cube’s decisive role in the history of moving-image systems will be made invisible by force of habit. Moviegoers today finds themselves in a position not unlike that of the contemporary art enthusiast who takes for granted the rarified and somewhat icy atmosphere of the gallery because this is the only environment with which he associates an exhibition. The cinema experience is indissolubly connected to these six elements, to such an extent that it seems nearly impossible to distinguish them from technologies of image recording and projection (broadly speaking, even open-air and drive-in theatres follow the same model).
Yet in reality, things are much different: the place that now seems so “obvious” struggled for twenty or thirty years to establish itself and its particular viewing style worldwide, and it had to contend with a series of alternative solutions, discarded only after a long battle. So, if we truly want to understand the movie theatre’s importance to cinema’s first century (and thus the consequences of its current marginalization, too), we must go back to the 1910s and ’20s, when the adoption of a specific model of architecture and of spectacle went together with a particular idea of the apparatus.
In this case, the marriage of history and theory can yield pleasant surprises. We have seen how the cinema we know is closely tied to separation from the outside world, to the dark, and to the spectator’s silence and immobility. As Jean Epstein wrote in the early 1920s, “Wrapped in darkness, ranged in cell-like seats, directed toward the source of emotion by their softer side, the sensibilities of the entire auditorium converge as if in a tunnel, toward the film. Everything else is barred, excluded, no longer valid.” And yet it was not always that way. The fundamental requisites that today’s audience associate with a movie theatre became a stable fixture at the end of a long process that can be considered complete only with the universal diffusion of the sound film. To say that the golden age of cinema roughly covered the same decades in which the art gallery enjoyed an unmatched prestige—from the 1920s to the beginning of the 1970s—is to exclude at least a quarter-century, if the count begins with the Lumière brothers’ first public projection on December 28, 1895 at the Café des Capucines in Paris. Just like the art gallery, it was only little by little—adjustment by adjustment and correction by correction—that a single standard was established: the white cube or the black cube, the completely empty room or the rows of seats, light from above or absolute darkness.
Before this happened, before the creation of a space expressly designed to host projections, the film experience was something quite different. Luckily, contemporary accounts give us a good idea of what it meant to see a movie for the first few decades of the last century. Still in the 1920s, when the movie theatre as we know it was just one of many hypotheses, it was not unusual for a journalist to dedicate half of his article to the merits, defects, and peculiarities of a theatre rather than to the film of the day. It is thus entertaining to discover the pioneers of film criticism as they classify the setting according to the public it served, the orchestra’s energy, or the attendants’ politeness; as they castigate the other customers’ less than impeccable manners; or as they comment with impressive competence on the quality of the drinks, or maybe the comfort of the seats (the leather padding or the rough wooden benches), the cleanliness, and the service. Entertaining, but above all instructive, because their words give us a better idea of the conditions under which a film was projected in those very first years, when anything and everything was still possible.
It is worth quoting at least one example at length:
The Winter Garden at Antwerp is a nice place. Should we call it a café-concert? Should we call it a movie house? When you enter, it’s hard to know for sure if you’re among a crowd of earnest schoolgirls or in a music hall. Both, I think. But it is lovely; the room never ends and it has six long parallel rows of tables that remind you of a wedding banquet. You drink, the music makes an infernal racket (in proportion!). Smartly uniformed ushers hurry the spectators along; it doesn’t smell bad, and it’s ventilated. The ticket for this paradoxical place costs twenty cents.
Thus wrote Louis Delluc (along with Jean Epstein, a future leading cineaste of the French Impressionist Cinema of the 1920s) in an article dated July 8, 1919, in the euphoria of the first months of peace after the close of the Great War. The sounds, the colors, and the odors of the Winter Garden will surprise a non-specialist reader today