And yet the Winter Garden is hardly exceptional, as the pages of any journalist of the period—not just Delluc—would lead us to conclude. There is the Marivaux in Paris, with its British dancers and their acrobatic numbers; there is the movie house on the Avenue de la Gare, in Nice, with a bar so illuminated there does not seem light enough left for the projector; or the Majestic at Nîmes, so much like a “well-run garage”—a talented projectionist, drinking binges, the Catholics separated from the Protestants and the French from the Spanish. Or, finally, there is the auditorium on Paris’s rue de la Roquette, the algid temple of the new art that sought to imitate those already in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and Amsterdam, which more closely resemble the spaces familiar to us today.
Delluc’s articles describe a situation not only French: at the beginning of the 1920s there still was no single viewing style for films, and in the large majority of cases the silence and order of our movie theatres was as yet very far off. A broad range of solutions remained open, though it is important to note that places like the one on the rue de la Roquette represented an exception. If Delluc described the picture house as an eminently promiscuous environment, this term should be understood first in the sense that many very different and often opposed functions were brought together in a single space: part restaurant, part bordello, part theatre, and a touch of the fair. For this reason, it is not only the Winter Garden that seems a “paradoxical place,” but each and every early picture house: sanctuary of images and noisy multicolored cavea with its contrasting vocations, between heaven and hell. “It has affinities with both church and alcove,” English architectural connoisseur Philip Morton Shand would write in 1930, with a touch of irony toward the sumptuous electicism of the new movie palaces. But above all, thanks to Delluc, we realize that, before the movie theatre’s triumph, seeing the film was not necessarily the main reason to go to the cinema; the pleasure of the unknown and the not always upright reputation of the men and women who frequented it must have played an important role in the effusive passion for the new art: elements that, if anything, made it even more captivating, as cinephiles of the 1910s and ’20s made abundantly clear.
We get a sense of what this plebian and itinerant cinema was like if we turn Delluc’s observations about the Winter Garden inside out. For each of his points of praise we can imagine the slightly disturbing reality of its opposite: nasty odors, lack of ventilation, equivocal encounters, uncomfortable seats. But more importantly, when it comes to a discussion of the auditorium as aesthetic device, what strikes us is its radically different viewing conditions from those of cinema’s classical age. Of the six elements characterizing cinematic viewing style, in fact, only screen size and the collective projections (points five and six) seem guaranteed in the case of the first picture houses:
1) No separation from the outside world. On the contrary, we have an open space where people wander freely, setting their own rhythm for the evening’s entertainment, moving from one area to the other, breaking up the viewing of the film with other activities. Such behavior is encouraged by the program’s extreme brevity and by the alternation of live and recorded performances.
2) No absolute darkness—a condition that in places like the Winter Garden seems neither attainable nor, to tell the truth, always desirable. Even without addressing the light needed by the members of the orchestra to read their music (when there is no player piano), newspapers of the period often speak of rose-colored lights kept on during the show to avoid a complete darkness that would have keep more timid types away.
3–4) No quiet and immobility on the part of the spectators. At the Winter Garden, as in many theatres, it is perfectly normal for those who watch the show to do other things simultaneously—eat, drink, chit-chat. Most importantly, spectators do not deliver themselves to silence (rather, as we gather from Delluc, it is quite probable that music and voices fill the room), partly because they do not always sit in straight lines facing the screen, as there are small tables for holding drinks and snacks, commonly arranged in rows emanating out from the center, in a semi-circle.
As soon as we consider the conditions of cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century—a technical marvel with an at best dubious artistic stature, like the X-ray—the reasons for this anarchy are clear. Perfectly contemporaneous, the discoveries of the Lumière brothers and the Curies were often paired in theatrical posters and newspaper reports as must-see modern wonders: the life of shadows and the mystery of fluorescence alongside the bearded lady and elephant man (as David Lynch well understood, Elephant Man being one of his many films about cinema and its tricks). This uncertainty surely did not help to set a single standard. Still lacking a space expressly dedicated to projections, movies were forced to seek hospitality elsewhere, and it was perfectly normal that they wound up leaning on other, often older kinds of spectacle, and being conditioned by them. The “cinema,” each time, was where the projector was: in a café or a temporarily empty garage, under a circus tent, at a fair, on an improvised vaudeville stage. This precarious condition recalls the medieval theatre, when, in the absence of a special building for performances, it was up to the actors to “theatricalize” the spaces of daily life through their presence, and a show could be held just about anywhere—on a street corner as in a market square, in the aisles of a church, or on a platform erected for the occasion in a palace courtyard.
Theatre’s nomadic conditions before the codification of an architectural place of performance naturally involved a tremendous willingness to adjust to very diverse contexts, but we find these same effects of a wandering existence in the early cinema as well. At the beginning of the century—when the program changed according to the location and occasion in which the film was being shown—vaudeville and fairground theatres, cafés, and circuses not only gave hospitality to the projection, but also decisively influenced the audience’s reaction. Condemned to maximum versatility, the early cinema had no choice but to be absorbed by a larger show and, above all, to be contaminated by less demanding forms of entertainment. In the 1920s, films would have a lot to be forgiven for, as cinema struggled to be counted among the respectable disciplines, on the same level as music or literature—so much so that avant-garde directors’ insistence on the concept of “pure cinema” (an entirely cinematic cinema, completely freed of its borrowings from the sister arts) seems the natural correlate to the desire to cleanse films of contact with all that was impure.
Only the picture house’s institutionalization put an end to this long and sometimes uneasy cohabitation. It is for this reason that the birth of a cinematic viewing style and of the “classical spectator” should not be separated from the attempt finally to offer the projector a room of its own. According to historians, the first buildings constructed as regular venues for projections date back to 1906–07—even if each country has its own chronology, and in Europe they tried to restructure pre-existing spaces whenever possible, especially in the city center. The big step was in any case already taken. With entirely new or partially modified architectural spaces, cinema had ceased to be a guest and could finally set the rules of the game in absolute freedom—invent for itself a viewing style that fully corresponded not only to what it was, but primarily to what it planned to become. This process was well described by Giuseppe Lavini in a 1918 article for L’architettura italiana: “The new institutions install themselves in suitable environments: then bit by bit as they take on their own shape, as they consolidate their own existence and establish the particulars of their functions, they set themselves up in buildings that have their own special form.”
Some habits that the public contracted in the first years of the century would endure for quite a while. We know, for example, that, until the rise of the talkie, English spectators continued to divide themselves between the orchestra and balconies according to a convention typical of the music hall: those who planned to enjoy just a half-hour of entertainment watched from the orchestra, while those who intended to stay the entire evening went upstairs. However, with the birth of a place expressly conceived for movies, the hard part was already done. The compromises over, the solidarities of yesteryear renounced, compulsory cohabitation brought to an end, for cinema there suddenly opened a myriad of opportunities that had been unimaginable just a few years before.
Naturally, not even the dark cube came out of nowhere. Alongside the embarrassing relatives,