18. Spectatorship: The Invisible Cinema

In December 1970, the first Invisible Cinema opened in New York at the original Anthology Film Archives. It ran till 1974. It was designed by Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka as a distraction-free, total cinematic environment.

The Invisible Cinema was envisaged as an architectural space that would be completely focused on the image and sound of the film.

"All the elements of the cinema are black: the rugs, the seats, the walls, the ceiling. Seat hoods and the elevation of the rows protect one's view of the screen from interception by the heads of viewers in front. Blinders eliminate the possibility of distractions from the side. We call it The Invisible Cinema." (Manifesto quoted from Karsten Witte's collection Theorie des Kinos). 

Later in 1989 after a modified version of the original idea was set up in the film auditorium of the Albertina in Vienna, author and critic Harry Tomicek wrote:

“The conversion of the auditorium makes the 'Invisible Cinema' the only cinema in the world to remain shadowed to the point of invisibility and utterly removed from our perception while we see films. Similarly, in remaining invisible, this architectural space grants us a maximum of concentration and pleasurable immersion in what becomes visible and audible within it: a suggested world made of image and sound known as film." (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)

In the article Invisible Cinema, A Movie Viewing Machine, author Gamze Yesildag writes how Peter Kubelka envisioned the cinema:

“He calls the space he designed a ‘movie-viewing machine’: This revolutionary and controversial design is based on the idea of ​​cameras, movie processing machines, film editing machines and projectors to which the film is attached. The room where the movie is watched must be a machine designed for watching movies.”

Image Source: Invisible Cinema, A Movie Viewing Machine

17. Spectatorship: Cinema Protocol

The cinema space is an isolated black box that disconnects the spectator from the outside world. Talking and the use of phones is politely discouraged. Instead, the spectator is invited to watch and listen to what they see and hear in the cinema space.

Perhaps the cinema is a place for the tuning of our visual and auditory senses; to "quieten the mind and render it susceptible to divine intervention” as Cage suggested. American experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton once said:

“For the most part, people don’t allow themselves the time or the circumstances to get into a relationship with the world that provides freedom to actually look at things.”

Perhaps the cinema is a place to experience the gradual, uninterrupted passing of real time.

2 stills from Study of a River [1996-1997] dir. Peter Hutton

Inside the cinema the spectator sits quietly still, looking forwards for the duration of the screening. Film time is linear time, unfolding in a space that remains physically static and seemingly permanent. 

The various conditions of a typical cinema space - sound, light, furnishings, seating, temperature, air quality - are highly controlled to create a comfortable, distraction-free environment. Carefully positioned cinema loudspeakers behind the screen and mounted around the walls and ceiling direct specific channels of sound into the seating area. Soundproof walls, absorption panels, soft furnishing and thick curtains help to reduce extraneous noise and dampen the natural acoustics of the cinema space. Except for the presence of fire exit signs, house lighting is switched off for the duration of the film, while the entrance doors remain closed. All this is designed in order to promote a focused, immersive experience of the film performance. 

BFI Southbank Cinema (NFT1), London

The cinema space however is never silent. There is always an audible hum and rumble - the sound of the space itself. Air quality control in a post-pandemic age makes this more so.

No two cinema spaces sound alike. Every room possesses its own particular acoustic character.

16. Spectatorship: Disciplined Contemplation and Musicking

The cinema developed out of the theatre and concert hall. All share an interest in the eye.

Today, in most parts of the world, the typical Euro-centric concert hall, theatre or cinema space politely requests its visitors to be silent and still for the duration of the programme. This is in order to minimise distractions and create a suitable atmosphere for concentrated attention.

Amour [2012] dir. Michael Haneke

The conventions of cinema spectatorship originate in the 19th Century. This was a time when attitudes concerning the proper conduct and social behaviour at classical music concerts began to change. Audience participation, background talking and the presence of animals inside performance venues began to be outlawed. Instead, a quieter more reverential atmosphere began to emerge that cultivated the private and polite contemplation of the performance spectacle.

Contemporary, westernised film spectatorship is an expression of a 20th century modernist value system. This promotes certain attitudes of decorum towards the veneration of high art. Such values serve to affirm an atmosphere of disciplined spectatorship. In music, the still, silent, concentrated listener, that cultivates, according to Theodor Adorno, the authentic, actively engaged expert listener. This is in contrast to the common listener, the jitterbug, who is slavishly subsumed by the salacious rhythms of popular music. 

For Adorno high art and intellectualism are pitted against the entertainment and commercialisation of the emerging 20th Century Culture Industry; the mind at war with the body. But this disciplined spectatorship is only one among many ways of experiencing performance events.

In a typical all-night Javanese shadow puppet performance (Wayang Kulit) the audience is welcome to come and go as they please, engaging with the puppets and music in different ways from different perspectives. Spectators are free to seat themselves either side of the translucent screen. On one side they can witness the play of shadows. On the other they can watch the master pupeteer (Dalang) manipulate the various hand-made puppets while also observing the gamelan musicians performing along side him. Food stalls are often setup nearby, and the general ebb and flow of village activity mingles with the sounds of the gamelan and the flickering display of shadows.

Throughout Indonesia performance of all kinds feel like an occasion to strengthen community bonds and identity. These collective rituals assist in establishing and maintaining healthy relationships with the spirit world. Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists find similar ritualised patterns of behaviour and meaning-forming occuring in other cultures and communities throughout the world.

Musicologist Christopher Small expresses these ideas ecologically through his concept of Musicking.

"The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world." [Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, 1998]

As Small describes in his book, Musicking can be applied to performance practices across all cultures and traditions. This includes all amatuer as well as professional forms of the European classical tradition.

What kind of relationships are established in the cinema space? Is Musicking part of the film viewing/listening experience?

15. Spectatorship: Ritual

Ellen Dissanayake describes human art-making as: “Dromena - the sense of behaviour made special.”

The stage performance is a unique ritualised multi-sensorial occasion for the presentation of activities outside the norms and habits of everyday living.

Spectators observe performers - registering facial expressions, body movements, the gestures and handling of props, costumes and instruments. In this the spectator discovers something mysterious and fascinating.

In all types of performance settings the visual and auditory senses remain coupled in constant stimulation.

14. Spectatorship: The Visual Aspect of Music and Theatre

Embodied music cognition considers the human body as the natural mediator between mind and physical environment. It explores how music perception is based on action; how movement (i.e. dancing to music) provides corporeal meaning. In contrast, a disembodied approach to music cognition is concerned with how cerebral meaning is formed through perception-based analysis of musical structure.

Composer Harry Partch [1901-1974] with his instruments. Source link here.

Inspired by the colourful costumes, elaborate masks and dramatic gestures of East Asian performing arts, writer and theatre director Antonin Artuad [1896-1948] challenged the conventions of European theatre. He described his newly conceived Theatre of Cruelty as “a new theatrical language of totem and gesture – a language of space devoid of dialogue that would appeal to all the senses.” Modern theater for Artuad was to be a visceral spectacle of light, sound and gesture.

Some years later in America, composer Harry Partch [1901-1974] similarly challenged euro-centric conventions of spectatorship and performance, stressing instead the importance of music as a multi-sensory experience involving the body: 

“[…] the music itself, elusive to words. I call it corporeal, because it roots itself with other arts necessary to civilization, in a unity that is important to the whole being - mind and body. Even the visual element of seeing the instruments played is a vital one.”

Concurrent with Partch’s idiosyncratic music, Jazz pianist and composer Sun Ra [1914-1993] was busy on the East Coast with his Arkestra band. Together they were developing their own type of Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner's notion of a total artwork incorporating all other art forms). These increasingly elaborate performances unfolded in a ritual-like atmosphere and involved costumes, visual art, dancers and collective drumming.

Despite working at different times and places, these three maverick artists shared an interest in the embodied, corporeal dimension of their work. Performance for them was a powerfully visceral, multi-sensory spectacle.

13. Spectatorship: The Transsensorial

“The eye carries information and sensations only some of which can be considered specifically and irreducibly visual (e.g. color); most others are transsensory. Likewise, the ear serves as a vehicle for information and sensations only some of which are specifically auditive (e.g., pitch and intervallic relationships), the others being, as in the case of the eye, not specific to this sense […] In the transsensorial or even metasensorial model […] the sense are channels, highways more than territories or domains.” [Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 1994, p137]

We see and hear through a web of senses. Neurological research suggests that lived experience occurs where mind, body and world converge. 

In a 2005 paper titled Why Seeing is Believing: Merging Auditory and Visual Worlds, IIana Witten and Eric Knudsen question the traditional reasoning that visual capture reflects an inherent physiological advantage that favors visual over nonvisual spatial information. The authors suggest that:

“visual capture occurs not because of any inherent advantage of visual circuitry, but because the brain integrates information optimally.”