Guy G

In the Dark: On the Experience of Going to the Cinema

"I've always considered movies evil; the day cinema was invented was a black day for mankind." - Kenneth Anger.

Suppose you decide to see a movie. You check out ads, find out the show time, then go to the theater and watch it. Sounds relatively simple, right? Yet, upon examination, the film-going experience is an extremely complex, mysterious, even problematic activity. To watch a film is an intricate and largely invisible transaction in which your central nervous system is intensely engaged in receiving heavily coded information. Multinational corporations, through their subsidiaries the movie studios, craft for us these extremely expensive packages of carefully recorded and edited sequences of images and sound. These products are, in turn, assembled and interpreted on-the-fly in the audience’s mind in a truly miraculous feat of reality fabrication, a trance-like artificial dream state. Augmented with multi-channel digital sound, the screen image’s tremendous size and resolution engenders overwhelming authority in transmitting its complex and compressed contents of character, setting, and story. The force and power of this medium that can create an evocative and compelling experience, but later reflection reveals that it is oftentimes an empty one. The cinematic medium’s capability for sensory and emotional manipulation makes critical evaluation of the film and the motives of the film makers difficult and creates an unequal power relationship between the makers of the film and you, the viewer.

First, however, they have to get you in the theater. Narrative film is primarily an emotional art form. Most commercial films exploit fantasies and wish fulfillment to emotionally hook us and draw us into their lair. Before we enter the theater, we must be primed with a set of seductive promotional texts, images and sounds to set up the moods and expectations that both lead us to the box office and also allow the film a head start in weaving its hypnotic spell. Film promoters frequently try to draw us in by suggesting in advertisements that we will be transported to a different world and, through identification with the leading characters, undergo a transformative experience that will change us somehow. Often theatrical trailers describe the effect the story’s climax has on the main characters by using the phrase, “…and changed their lives forever.” The implicit message is that the same kind of permanent change will be visited on our own lives. This is rarely the case, but the promise is still made time and again, and, by and large, we dutifully keep coming back for more.

Let’s go into the theater together: We get out of the car and converging with other strangers, enter the multiplex. After entering, we sit in a dark room. We speak in hushed tones and turn off our cellular phones. We munch exorbitantly priced popcorn. The lights go down. Once the process begins, like Plato’s Cave, the sole source of light is a projector positioned behind a small window in the back wall. With a light source that shines through an existing film image or frame, a projector is a camera in reverse; a shutter opens and flashes the image-shaped light through a lens that enlarges it many thousands of times. During the periods of darkness when the shutter is closed, the projector’s mechanism advances to the next film frame and each time the shutter opens, successive images shoot out at the speed of light. The periods of complete darkness are actually of far longer duration than the brief slices of time allowed the images, which are sprayed, twenty-four a second, against the bright white screen on the opposite wall. But the fact remains; we are unknowingly watching a completely dark, blank screen over half the time.

The flashing images exploit a quirk of the human eye and trick our brains by lingering on our minds’ private canvases for a comparatively far longer amount of time than they exist on the theater’s screen. When the shutter opens next, faster than a blink of our eyes, the previous image seems instantly replaced by another slightly different image. In fact this phenomenon, called persistence of vision, probably evolved so that the blinking process doesn’t create distracting visual discontinuities. Driven by the human brain’s addiction for ceaselessly seeking patterns in its environment, our minds hunt for similarities between the two images and join them together in a continuous dialectical process that is the basic unit of the filmic illusion. In the theater of our skulls, our minds’ eyes have fused with the play of shadows on the cinema screen. In this vulnerable state, our collective hallucination begins.

The next step up in the film construction hierarchy is the shot. A shot is an uninterrupted string of sequential frames. When two shots are put together the joining process is called an edit or cut. Like magnetic poetry words on a refrigerator door, the shots can be mixed up and arranged in any number of ways. Now so commonplace as to be invisible, this practice of cutting was a revolutionary development in its day. Very early silent films had shots of much longer duration. With the camera fixed in one place, the narrative information was conveyed within the static film frame. Actors entered, moved, gestured and exited the frame, which functioned like a stage proscenium. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan described this as the tendency of a new medium to first imitate the older medium it is replacing.

Film director D.W. Griffith was an early explorer and innovator of the art of editing. His Birth of a Nation thrilled and startled audiences with its new editing techniques. Suddenly, in a fracturing of space and time, the camera’s eye would seem to jump through space to see the fleeting expression of fear on an actor’s face and then jump back to see her whole body and the perilous situation she was reacting to. With parallel cutting, the camera could instantaneously transport us through space and time to see simultaneous actions by characters apparently separated by great distances. Let’s not forget, however, that a powerful film like Birth of a Nation uses these techniques to promulgate Griffith’s hideous racist propaganda.

Editing can create other effects that border on alchemy. For example, two shots joined in such a way that the meaning and appearance of each is changed. In Jonathan Jones’ August 31, 2001, article, “The Silent Revolutionary” in The Guardian UK, he wrote of an experiment performed in 1917. Film theorist Lev Kuleshov took some footage of an actor who had an unchanging facial expression. Kuleshov then edited in shots of a bowl of soup, a little girl playing and an elderly deceased woman lying in a coffin. When the resulting footage was shown to an audience, viewers marveled at the look of hunger on the actor’s face when looking at bowl of soup, the look of love on his face when looking at his little daughter, and the look of sorrow when looking at his dead mother. Kuleshov showed the juxtaposition of shots created an interpretive effect in the minds of viewers that literally changed how the images looked. Since, by definition, images are nothing else than “how they look,” this editing process, called montage, shows that images are not necessarily objective artifacts. They have a slippery plasticity and contextual sensitivity that changes with the way they are positioned and the assumptions of the viewer. Yet again, let’s remember that these developments in film technique were used by Josef Stalin’s regime to make film propaganda to perpetuate and increase his power. One outcome was Stalin’s minions slaughtered between 20 and 100 million people.

We may appear passive as we sit in the theater taking in contextually complex visual and audio information, but we are in fact quite busy. It is as if we have a robotic state-of-the-art production studio inside our heads, constructing, suturing, molding and shaping the movie into a seamless gestalt. This sounds like a lot of work. It is. For a mainstream narrative film to be successful in enslaving the audience for the over two hours duration of a movie, we must want to fully participate in its assembly.

Film making teams take weeks or months planning every plot point, every line of dialog, every sound, every image that goes into a film. As the audience, we are at a severe disadvantage, as we only have the running time of the film to critically react to and interpret this onslaught of information. A film is prepared for its target market to assemble with just the right amount of difficulty, at one extreme the film can be boring or at the other, it can be confusing. With black ink on the corporate bottom line their primary goal, these faceless technicians lead us through a carefully engineered sequence of thoughts, emotions and surprises like an exhilarating ride in an amusement park.

But the magic does not last. Blinking and squinting, we emerge from the dark cave only to relapse into our brightly lit humdrum existences, and as the dream fades, we grasp at ephemeral wisps. In terms of marketing merchandise, this apparent failure of the film to permanently transform us is in fact its strongest point: by buying the soundtrack, the game, the DVD, the magazine and the T-shirt, we seek to procure a souvenir, a relic, a fetish of the now evaporating hallucination. Like the wistful longing of a junkie dreaming of that final, permanent fix, we can only look forward to the next cinematic spectacle.

As movie watchers, we are tireless toilers in the dark mines of the multiplex. We are brave onieronauts who willingly submit our fragile central nervous systems to the cinematic product downloads of faceless corporations, and we continue to gladly pay to collaborate in the production of our own dreams. On later reflection, we may ruefully realize that we have been duped; but we rationalize, like abused lovers, that maybe it was our fault, and perhaps the next time will be better. Béla Balázs wrote: “We must be better connoisseurs of the film if we are not to be as much at the mercy of perhaps the greatest intellectual and spiritual influence of our age as to some blind and irresistible elemental force." 1

With all this in mind, the question begs to be asked: Does it still sound relatively simple?

1 Marcus, Fred. Film and Literature. Scranton, PA: Chandler Publishing, 1971