25. The Cinema: Beyond the Black Box

Commenting on the future of cinema for the publication Where is Cinema, writer and former artists' moving image programme director at Tyneside Cinema (2018-20) Adam Pugh says:

“If cinema has a future, it certainly is in its being a social space. There are a lot of things that the visual arts could learn from cinema. A lot of people will not go into a gallery because they feel put off or threatened by it. A cinema is inherently more democratic because its history is all about this space for people to come together and have a collective experience.”

How does the cinema define itself in an age of multiplexes and online streaming? What kind of public setting for the screening of films exists beyond the conventional cinema space? Do the operation of alternative spaces compromise the filmmakers vision?

Art galleries, pubs, bars, community halls, churches, drive-through spaces and city parks are all commonly used to organise film events. These spaces broaden the public presentation of films to a wider audience who might not normally have access to a traditional cinema venue. The codes and practices of these spaces, as well as their technical and physical affordances, open up a variety of film experiences for audiences across different cultural and geographic contexts.

Images: Deptford Cinema - a volunteer-run 39-seater cinema space in South-East London.
For more information visit: http://deptfordcinema.org/.

The environmental, technical and social factors of these alternative spaces contribute to the formation of a unique screening soundscape, one in which the signal and noise of the film work, as well as the event itself, are redefined. The alternative space is, to apply Jonas Mekas’ famous phrase, the promise of “a less perfect but more free” site for cinema. 

“There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.” - Jonas Mekas [1959].

24. The Cinema: Film in the Art Gallery

In 1993 Beligum Filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman released her 16mm experimental documentary D’Est. In addition to its theatrical screening, the film was also presented as a multi-screen art installation. In an interview with art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the filmmaker discusses the change in spectatorship that the gallery setting provides, allowing for a more physically active engagement with the work:

“The aim of this installation is to enable people to move around […] [a] desire to get the spectator physically involved in the installation space, which is why you had to arrange the screens not in a straight line. By which I mean that the video has often been reproached for inducing a contemplative and hence passive attitude in viewers, due to the frontal arrangement of the monitors. The idea of distributing what is to be seen in different directions is an effective solution to the problem.”

Tate Modern Turbine Gallery Space • Incoming [2017] by Richard Mosse

In the pure white cube of the art gallery the visitor is invited to stroll around. Film works repeat on loop, installed in a physically temporary space for the duration of the exhibition. With considerable effort and finance, an isolated black box can be constructed inside the gallery.

In a 2005 interview Christian Marclay commented on the nature of sound in gallery settings:

“Well, I think it’s great that there is this interest in sound and music, but the overall art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented.”

The gallery is dynamic, unwieldy, impossible to tame. A bare interior endlessly reflects; voices reverberate, strolling bodies are audible bodies, neighbouring artworks sonically invade.

Now [2015] by Chantal Akerman • m.A.A.d [2014] by Kahlil Joseph

No space is the same, the conditions are constantly changing. Touring exhibitions, like film screenings, always sound different from place to place. To meet the economic demands of an ever-changing schedule of exhibitions and events, the gallery remains a highly adaptable physical space. Its spatial arrangement - the way in which it might guide its visitors - is quickly rearranged with movable wall partitions, hanging fixtures, sculptures and mobile lighting. The acoustic properties of the gallery space are in continual flux.

Sound is everywhere, emanating from nearby artworks or the noise and background chatter of strolling visitors and nearby traffic. Headphones provide a certain type of soundproof solution but at a potential cost to the spatial experience of the work itself.

180 Strand, London • Broken Spectre [2022] by Richard Mosse

Video artworks can be conceived with the exhibition site in mind. Or, in the case of particular types of sound art, directly engage with and emerge from the spatial properties of the space itself. The video work of Bill Viola transforms gallery rooms into resonant chambers. Low subterranean murmurings swarm around the space, complex masses of water fill the room with an incessant, overwhelming rapture of noise. Viola describes these works as “total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound” - an immersive experience of the gallery space itself.

Source: Chantal Akerman interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

23. The Cinema: Electroacoustic Expansion

In 1956 The Philips Electronic Company commissioned Le Corbusier to design and build a pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Rather than build a conventional exhibition stall, the architect promised to construct:

“an Electronic Poem and a vessel containing the poem; [where] light, color image, rhythm and sound join together in an organic synthesis.”

Composer and architect Iannis Xenakis assisted Le Corbusier in the design of the structure. He also created a unique musique concrète tape piece titled Concret PH (1958) to be played inside the pavilion. This two and half minute minature consisted of burning charcoal sounds subjected to various sonic transformations and overdubs to create dense granular textures. These layers of sounds were projected via the pavilion’s 400 loudspeakers, acting as a transitional music to help guide visitors into the performance space. For the main presentation, Edgard Varèse’s eight minute electronic composition Poème électronique (1958) was diffused and spatially synchronised with an array of projected video and light displays. The completed pavilion was one of the first electronic-spatial environments to combine architecture, film, light and music into a total experience made to function in time and space. Its unique sound diffusion system prefigured later designs such as Francois Bayle’s 80 loudspeaker system The Acousmonium.

Around the time of the World’s Fair in Brussels, abstract filmmaker Jordan Belson and musican Henry Jacobs were busy in San Francisco organising a series of innovative audiovisual concerts called Vortex Concerts. These events took place at the Morrison Planetarium and utilised a large number of projectors and loudspeakers to playback and manipulate various sounds and images in space. In 1963, experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek began building his own hemispherical theatre, the Movie Drome in New York, where he would organise live collage performances of images, video and multi-channel sound. Experimenting beyond mere video playback, these multi-sensorial performance events influenced the development of the psychedelic light shows of the 1960s. Today they are recognised as precursors to what is now considered Expanded Cinema - moving image and sound beyond the conventions of cinema spectatorship.

Hollywood was increasingly interested in the potential for spatialised sound in the cinema. In 1978 Dolby introduced a split surround system (stereo) for the screening of Superman, while a newly conceived Dolby Stereo 70mm six track system was designed a year later for the cinematic screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Philips Pavilion, World’s Fair 1958 • Movie Drome performance, circa 1963, Stan Vanderbeek

The use of multiple loudspeaker technology to project sound in space has been integral to the development and public presentation of electronic and tape-based music throughout the 20th century. The playback and manipulation of pre-recorded sounds in both concert and installation settings emerged out of the innovations in magnetic tape as well as multi-channel loudspeaker technology. These contributed to the development of an electroacoustic art form concerned with exploring “the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.”

In both public presentation and performance - inside both the cinema, the concert hall and beyond - film sound and contemporary music deploy a similar array of electroacoustic technologies to project and diffuse sound across multiple loudspeakers.

22. The Cinema: Vibrational Space

When I say that I see a sound, I mean that I echo the vibration of the sound with my whole sensory being. (Phenomenology of Perception, pg 234, Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

The experience of sound vibrating in a cinema room is the convergence of the spectator’s body, electroacoustic technology and the particular characteristics of the physical space. The darkened room is illuminated by the play of light projected onto the screen. The amplified sounds of the film’s soundtrack activate the acoustics of the space, vibrating the air molecules that surround the spectator’s body. The cinematic sound space is constructed spatially and socially within the cinema architecture itself and in the film work we see and hear. The cinema is an embodied multi-sensorial experience that unifies the spectator with the spatio-temporal site that they inhabit.

In 1974 the blockbuster movie Earthquake was released. For its theatrical premiere a unique subwoofer soundsystem was developed called “Sensurround”.

With the increasing populatory of television, Jennings Lang, a producer and former executive of MCA/Universal Television, identifed the need for movies to distinguish themselves as expanded entertainment spectacles that could provide a thrilling experience unique to the cinema setting. Inspired by a recent Los Angeles tremor experience, Lang approached the Universal City Studios Sound Department about making Sensurround a reality for a future earthquake film.

W.O. Watson, a retired former sound director for Universal, returned to work to join the engineering team that would go on to design and build the Sensurround system. In 1974 Watson told American Cinematographer:

“When I saw the Earthquake script I realized that we would be able to come up with a form of audience participation - something that would make the viewers feel that they were part of the action that was going on [...] We generate both sub-audible and audible frequencies that actually vibrate the torso and the diaphragm inside the body. You feel something going on in your flesh and the auditory nerves are also responding to the sensation. The viewer feels that the building is shaking. It isn’t really, but it feels that way. If you touch a thin plaster wall in the theater, or if you touch a seat that has metal in it, you find that the seats [are] actually vibrating.”

By 1977 there were reportedly 800 Sensurround equipped cinemas around the world, showing such films as Midway (1976), Rollercoaster (1977) and Battlestar Galatica (1978). By the end of the decade other extended low frequency formats like Warner Brothers’ Megasound began to be developed. This lead to the wider development and manufacturing of subwoofer technology both inside and outside the cinema.

Sources: The Earthquaking, Subwoofing Magic of Sensurround by Marke B.
Images: …in Sensurround by Thomas Hauerslev

21. The Cinema: Private/Public Spectacle

It is in this urban dark that the body’s freedom is generated; this invisible work of possible affects emerges from a veritable cinematographic cocoon; the movie spectator could easily appropriate the silkworm’s motto: inclusum labor illustrat; It is because I am enclosed that I work and glow with all my desire. (Roland Barthes, Leaving the Movie Theatre)

Beginning in 1888 Thomas Edison, along with his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, began to develop the Kinetoscope - a peep-hole motion picture viewer. Inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Edison described his ideas for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" - record and reproduce objects in motion. Initially it was hoped that the Kinetoscope would play synchronised sound and image. Edison believed that this could help drive sales of the Phonograph. In 1893 he gave the Kinetoscope its first public presentation at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York.

The Kinetoscope was designed for private viewing. A peep-hole at the top of the cabinet allowed the viewer to see the animated images moving inside. By 1894 Kinetoscope parlous were being setup in New York. A parlour consisted of several machines each playing a different film of between 30-60 seconds in length.

In 1895 the Lumiere brothers publicly unveiled their own camera-projector invention - the Cinematographe. Later that year they organised the world’s first commercial movie screening at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The Cinemtographe was smaller and lighter than Edison’s moving image technology. The machine’s ability to project light meant it could display moving images on a screen for an audience.

In 1905 popular showman Harry Davis established the first Nickelodeon motion picture theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Often combining short film screenings with vaudeville performances, these storefront theatres quickly spread in populatority throughout the United States. By 1910 there were more than10,000 such theatres across the country.

In 1925 Scottish engineer John Logie Baird demostrated the world’s first working television system. Mechanical television systems were soon replaced by electronic systems that used a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). In 1934 Telefunken manufactured the first commercial CRT television sets.

Beginning with the Kinetoscope, the early viewing parlous and the grand movie palaces that followed, through to the high street cinema, consumer television, 20th century digital communication, the Internet and online streaming services, the history of moving image technology and the corresponding cultivation of viewing habits, seemingly circles back on itself: From private peeping to public spectacle to home viewing and mobile streaming.

20. The Cinema: Gulliverisation

The cinema is a uniquely immersive space. It sensorially envelops the spectator with sound and light. Through submission the audience comports itself as active spectators.

Images and sounds projected into cinema space stand over and above the spectator, both temporally and spatially. The spectator remains small, the cinema machine big. Private, mobile technology inverts this relationship.

Wizard of Oz [1939] dir. Victor Fleming

Media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo has written about the “Gulliverisation of the world”. Marked by accelerated industrial production, mass urbanisation, developments in advertising and technological innovation, this “increasing and diminishing of perspectives” began to emerge in the second half of the 19th century and continued into the early part of the 20th century. It led to what Huhtamo describes as a:

“radical change in the anthropomorphic, human-sized based world of perception of Western man […] the big became even bigger and the small even smaller.” [During this period'] “the size of the human observer kept on shifting between gigantic (in relation to the carte-de-visite photographs ortradecards) and Lilliputhian (in front of large billboards or below advertising spectacles in the sky). Something similar happened in the field of media 'immersion' into an enormous circular panorama or diorama painting (and later, the cinema screen) [that] found its counterpart in the act of peeking at three-dimensional photographs with the ubiquitous hand-held stereoscope.”

The big screen and the small screen - the big room and the little room. Differences in scale distinguish a public form of spectatorship from a domestic one. Through these differences of scale, territory and accessibility, the public space (cinema) - a site for possible social encounters - always threatens a potential diminishing of individual autonomy. The challenge to modern urban living is, as Georg Simmel outlined in 1903:

“the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.”

To leave the house is to relinquish absolute autonomy. In contrast, the domestic setting of the home (television) promises a sanctuary of individual control and comfort. Huhtamo writes:

“Gulliverisation operates at the divide between the public and the private. The urban environment, with the skyscraper as its ultimate manifestation, became more and more 'inhuman', whereas the home provided a return to the anthropomorphic scale.”

Reference: Gulliver in Figurine Land (en) [1990] E. Huhtamo, Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays [2009] E. Huhtamo, The Metropolis and Mental Life [1903] G. Simmel

19. The Cinema: Focus Space

In a recent conversation Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa considers the shared social experience of the cinema space:

“Now we have many different opportunities – TV, streaming services, websites, depending on what you like. It’s different though, because you watch films alone. You don’t feel the way the audience is receiving the film. I’m a little afraid of that, because I always make films for big screens with a good 5.1 sound and I like to feel the emotions of the viewers. Watching films together triggers immediate discussions afterwards. On the other hand, when you watch films alone or just with very few people, you have very limited possibilities to talk and to listen to what others have to say. In the future, cinemas may be like opera houses – something very special and unique. That’s why festivals are so crucial. They have to keep that possibility of watching films on a big screen. “

In a cultural landscape engineered to satisfy consumer demand, it is easy to feel that nothing in the world shows up as having any more value than anything else. All is simply a matter of choice according to the prevailing mood of any given moment. The apparent ‘levelling’ of meaning that pervades our culture expresses itself, in part, as the never-ending, accelerated consumption of private, portable and disposable media content. This is the raison d'etre of todays Content Industry.

Writing in the 1980s, Albert Borgmann presents a philosphy of focus things and practices to re-examine the instrumental rationality of our technological living. He writes:

"A focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them". 

One of the examples Borgmann uses is the “culture of the table”; the table that gathers together the active participation of the family, its traditions, cultures and the gits of nature.

The cinema is a publicly accessible place for the coordination of a focal event - a unique kind of viewing and listening space. A site for shared and private performance spectatorship, “a paradoxical mass-intimacy” as Walter Murch describes it. It gathers the scattered people around the glow of its screen, bringing into focus our private and shared condition.

Inside spectators submit themselves to the uninterrupted flow of time that constitutes the film performance. This collective experience, as with all socially sanctioned rituals, manifests the spectator’s shared ‘horizon of significance’; that which shows up in the world at that moment as significant and meaningful.