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Toward the Dark Cube
And now let us talk about places of performance.
Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria
We don’t sell movies, we sell seats.
Michael Loew
Probably no writer has described the movie theatre experience better than Julio Cortázar. The darkness and the silence, the solitude in being part of a crowd, the ecstasy in the presence of the images, the desire to jump into the screen, the impression that you are somewhere else even as you sit among your friends or a group of strangers:
You go to the movies or the theatre and live your night without thinking about the people who have already gone through the same ceremony, choosing the place and the time, getting dressed and telephoning and row eleven or five, the darkness and the music, territory that belongs to nobody and to everybody there where everybody is a nobody, the men or women in their seats, maybe a word of apology for arriving late, a murmured comment that someone picks up or ignores, almost always silence, looks pouring onto the stage or the screen, fleeing from what’s beside them, from what’s on this side.
This passage from We Love Glenda So Much offers an excellent starting point for reflecting on the condition of the spectator during the projection of a film, not least because of the novelist’s skill in sketching the dark cube experience through a catalog of such heterogeneous details. Sight, hearing, touch . . . A hypothetical list of the elements characterizing cinematic viewing would not be much more extensive than the one we find in the brilliant opening of Cortázar’s story. In the end, from the spectator’s point of view, there are, in fact, only six truly important features:
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 first and foremost because they furnish an idea of cinematic conviviality extremely distant from our own, where the film constitutes just one of the various ingredients of the entertainment—perhaps not even the most important one.
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, others were, quite the contrary, worth keeping in contact with. The prose theatre that had so often 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.
