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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 the movies was like going to church: you sat composed, silent, immobile, completely committed to whatever happened on screen. Or at least cinema’s new customers must have seemed this way in comparison to those who had gathered noisily in the back of a garage or in a vacant warehouse. It is not so relevant, then, that from this moment the history of the picture house was also—predictably—the history of the infractions against the stupendous effort to tightly control the public’s behavior during the show. Seen from the 1920s, those transgressions appeared to be necessary exceptions to an irreversible trend that led the dark cube quickly to impose its own viewing style just about everywhere, bulldozing over consolidated practices and definitively separating the history of cinema from that of the café-chantant, the fair, and the variety stage.

It matters little that the process was inevitably partial, and that popular venues continued to house every kind of entertainment for quite a while (in the early 1960s Jean-Luc Godard would still be in time to shoot an Italian cine-variety in Le mépris). Though it is impossible to draw a precise line between a “before” and an “after,” with the rise of the movie house and of the talkie the perception of what was normal and of what, conversely, was suddenly no longer acceptable (moving around during the film, commenting aloud about the scenes, entering and exiting the house . . .) had simply changed. For good.

A cinematic architecture and new model of spectator emerged hand-in-hand with a profound change in movies. Film historians agree: at least until the early 1910s movies were so different from the entertainment we know today that, strictly speaking, they should be treated as an autonomous form of expression with their own “language,” to be understood (and appreciated) in all its specificity. Herein lie the surprise and disappointment we experience when we approach the first short films: we simply do not understand them. The mistake is of course our own, because we ask them to resemble something that they are not, and did not intend to be. But the feeling of absolute alterity such movies produce today has stimulated research, and now we are in a better position to comprehend that season, having finally renounced the idea of linear evolution from simple to complex that dominated cinema histories until a few decades ago.

Many of the films made prior to 1908 are simply “moving landscapes”: shots of the Gulf of Naples or the Forbidden City of Beijing. But when an elementary plot takes shape, it corresponds only partly to our expectations, and we risk misinterpreting the image’s meaning. It is not just that close-up, aerial, and crane shots did not have the function they would later acquire, for it is not even certain that the pioneers thought about their works in the terms we do: for example, that they considered them—under any profile—as “art.” Generally speaking, their priorities seem altogether different. In these works, the tension between punctual and vectorial, image and sequence, framing and editing, that typifies later cinema is completely tilted in each case toward the first pole. From a formal point of view, the most conspicuous characteristic of this “cinema of attractions” (as scholars call it) is probably the short films’ serial structure, internally organized as a sequence of highly spectacular numbers—the real “highlights” of the projection—often completely gratuitous with respect to the story’s main action (when story exists) but appreciated by the public for their high visual impact.

Directors fought to avoid losing, even for an instant, the hold on the spectator, who literally needed to be kept attached to the seat. This was the first commandment of the original cinema, and even the movies’ limited duration, which allowed for alternating diverse subjects and themes and offered new sensory stimuli, responded in the end to the same need. When the first feature-length films were distributed around 1910, a cinematic spectacle must have seemed like little more than an uninterrupted, rapid, random sequence of comedy sketches, newsreels, magic acts, moving landscapes, and short adaptations of great literary classics (from Shakespeare to Dante, from Victor Hugo to the Little Flowers of St Francis).

This similarity to the variety stage’s poetics of shock, created by juxtaposing heterogeneous material, reconfirms the primitive cinema’s chameleonic readiness to adapt itself to the entertainments that, in those difficult years, hosted it for an evening or two. From the very beginning, films were regularly inserted into café-concert or music hall programs; and there were plenty who, like futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the 1913 Variety Theatre Manifesto, looked to film as a precious resource for innovating performance with “an incalculable number of otherwise unrealizable visions and spectacles (battles, riots, races, automobile and airplane circuits, trips, transatlantic flights, the depths of cities, the countryside, oceans, and skies).”

Developments would show that what seemed to many a love match was in reality a marriage of convenience; but years would pass before cinema renounced the errors of its youth. How to fault the futurists—at least on this level? The first films seemed conceived precisely for the time between a singer’s number and a musician’s act. Fragmentary, incoherent, brief, easy to follow for their simple plots and weak character psychologies, these movies were absolutely perfect for a cinema that had not yet discovered the centripetal force of the house. The music hall’s viewing style allowed people to chat, glancing occasionally at the screen without necessarily following the story, or, by the same token, to choose to let the calculated rhythm of the images carry them away. In either case, none of cinema’s pleasures would be lost.