The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  I could go on. The point is that most (if not all) of the allegedly British movies which apparently benefit from sharing a common language with their American competitors are, in fact, more accurately viewed as international co-productions that constitute only a very small and strangely exportable segment of the ‘home-grown’ market. The relative merits of each of these movies, which range from the drab to the delightful, are less important than the fact that for every British movie that benefits from the attentions of American audiences, there are hundreds whose chances of capturing a UK audience are entirely scuppered by the market predominance of American movies.

  So, to recap:

  1) Foreign language films from around the world can’t crack the UK multiplex market because they use subtitles, with which mainstream English-speaking audiences have a problem, apparently.

  2) English language films from Britain can’t crack the UK multiplex market because the screens are already full of Hollywood movies (which don’t use subtitles), many of which are English language remakes of the foreign language films which couldn’t get in there in the first place (because they use subtitles).

  3) If British movies are to succeed in the mainstream UK marketplace, they must first and foremost appeal to Americans.

  This is a pretty grim situation, both for our indigenous film production and for the distribution and exhibition of foreign language films in the UK.

  So what’s the solution?

  The answer most regularly offered in response to the first part of this question is ‘more public funding for British movies’, although frankly what’s the point of funding movies people either don’t want to see or (more importantly) can’t see? As I keep saying, the problem in the UK is not film production but film distribution, and we’re not going to solve anything by simply helping people make more dismal movies like Sex Lives of the Potato Men. As for quota systems in order to artificially boost the presence of British and foreign language films in the multiplexes, all the evidence suggests that such restrictive trade practices merely encourage piracy – a situation from which no one benefits, least of all the film-makers.

  No, the solution is far simpler, and it is this …

  Stop worrying so much about film production, and start worrying a bit more about the support and upkeep of independent UK cinemas that show the kinds of movies (British, foreign language, arthouse, etc.) in which the multiplexes have little or no interest. This is where public funding will have the most impact: fostering and maintaining an exhibition circuit that can help home production to thrive, encourage audience interest in non-English language fare and prevent Hollywood from steamrollering all other cultures into cinematic oblivion. Spend money supporting the cinemas that show movies other than the American blockbusters; help them rebuild their often crumbling old buildings, some of which have stood for over a century; invest in their role as centres of local culture, places where people can go to watch and talk about movies in terms other than their box-office clout. Help them to pay for ushers to monitor their screenings and ensure that patrons are properly respectful of each other and of the movies, and for projectionists who actually care whether a movie is shown in the right order, and in the correct ratio, and are able to give each individual performance their undivided attention. You don’t need to dictate the programmes of these cinemas, or set up quotas to ensure that they partake in the contractual exhibition of films no one wants to see. On the contrary, you give them the freedom to decide for themselves what to show, to build a relationship with an audience who are fed up with being fed visual junk food, and to nurture cineliterate film-goers who want something to look forward to other than The Ring 3D.

  In short, you invest in cinemas that speak the language of film – a language which knows no national boundaries, which has no fear of subtitles, and upon the continued existence of which the very future of cinema (in whatever language) depends.

  Epilogue

  THE END OF CELLULOID

  ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.’

  Jurassic Park

  One evening in the spring of 2009, I found myself at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, introducing a screening of one of my favourite films of all time, Silent Running. The cinema is a beauty; a proper old-fashioned picture palace with a sweeping balcony, theatrical curtains, sensible ticket prices, and a projection booth that smells of celluloid and sweat – in a good way. The clientele (many of whom are students from the local university) are enthusiastic, attentive and apparently more interested in films than in their mobile phones – at least while they’re in the cinema.

  All looked set for a wonderful occasion – a lonely journey to the farthest reaches of the galaxy with Bruce Dern and a couple of walking dustbins, accompanied by the heartbreaking warblings of Joan Baez (see previous book). The only problem was that the print of Silent Running was old and scratchy and had started to turn a peculiar shade of pink – a common problem with films from that era. Watching the opening credits, in which a pink snail crawled over a pink plant in the middle of a pink forest in pinky-black outer space, I started to wonder whether the audience would be able to appreciate the full melancholic majesty of the movie. Wouldn’t this new candyfloss colouring somewhat undercut the sense of awe and wonder that director Doug Trumbull had worked so hard to achieve?

  Fortunately, the projectionist at the Hyde Park Picture House was an old-school type who had taken the trouble to test-run the print the evening before the screening and discovered that the chemical degeneration of the past 30 years eased up significantly during the second reel. Thus we were able to warn viewers in advance that while the credits sequence looked a little unusual, if they could just bear with it things would improve dramatically long before the second act kicked in. After all, we explained, the print they were watching was probably the same print that had done the rounds when the movie was first released in the early seventies, and if any of them had seen it on its first run (as I had) then they were about to be reunited with an old friend who (like them, probably) had become a little greyer and more crumpled round the edges since their last encounter.

  I really liked this idea that the film had aged along with its audience, and for all the imperfections of the picture I was thrilled that we were projecting from celluloid rather than digital because somehow it made the experience seem more special, more magical, more … real. I am not alone in this. In the 25 years since I first started working as a film critic (rather than living a fantasy life as one), it’s amazing how many directors have waxed lyrical to me about apparently obsolete celluloid. In 2006, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Steven Spielberg (arguably the most successful director of the 20th century) described to me the ‘extreme exhilaration and fear of this new medium’ that had been provoked by his first visit to the cinema, to watch The Greatest Show on Earth – an experience which left him addicted to the terrifying thrill of celluloid. An anxious child who never recovered from his parents’ separation, Spielberg described himself as ‘afraid of everything: of the dark; of small enclosures; of people talking too loud; and of my own imagination’. To such a person, a cinema – essentially a small darkened enclosure with amplified sound in which the imagination runs riot – should have been hell on earth. And yet the young Spielberg who sat there aghast as ‘these images washed over me, frightening me, overwhelming me’ was immediately addicted, desperate to break into the projection box and delve into the mystery of film. Having once been ‘afraid of everything’, Spielberg – who went on to scare the shit out of a generation with Jaws – crucially described his obsession with cinema as being not a way of exorcising his fears but of ‘freezing them, of collecting them, and keeping them for my whole life’. It was as if he were the cinematic equivalent of a butterfly collector, capturing the primal fears that flitted around him every night and pinning them to a board, to be marvelled and wondered at by the watching world.

  A key
part of this clearly transgressive process was the inhalation of the vaporous fumes that had first given cinema its explosive reputation. Just as lepidopterists use chloroform to capture the form of a flitting creature, wings open as if in flight, so cinema captured its images on celluloid via the administration of chemicals which, if inhaled too deeply, could send one off into the rapturous sleep of dreams. And unlike so many of his contemporaries who had already succumbed to the sterile precision of digital information, Spielberg at 60 still clung to that heady whiff of celluloid, greedily inhaling the scent of vagrant history which wafted in its wake like the trailing embers of an opium pipe. ‘An editing room with film,’ he told me with nostril-filling relish, ‘smells like … well, it’s the same smell that King Vidor smelled, and D.W. Griffith smelled, and Cecil B. DeMille smelled, and John Ford smelled. It’s the same smell that Kurosawa smells, and Truffaut smells and Antonioni smells. It is the smell of our medium.’

  This is something I have heard a thousand times before: from film-makers who have no interest in drugs but who seem to achieve an artistic high simply by inhaling the air of an editing room; and from projectionists who handle the sacred prints that pass through their hands with the care and attention of bomb disposal experts dealing with the most sensitive high explosives. And the smell that causes so much comment is on some level the ‘smell of fear’ (as the subtitle of Naked Gun 2 1/2 would have it), a sanitised relative of the nitrate reek that had once turned the air into an atmospheric tinderbox in search of a naked flame.

  No wonder the Cinematograph Act of 1909 viewed the emergent medium of cinema with such sulphurous distrust, as anxieties about what was on the films (basically gunpowder – or, as silent film expert Bryony Dixon more accurately says, ‘gun cotton’) became inextricably intertwined with what was in them (spectacle, excitement, moral depravity, etc.). The earliest critics of the peep-show arcades and picture palaces that followed (those who had sniffed the future and recoiled from its pungent power) had been particularly incensed about the effects of film on women, children and servants (underlings all), complaining about crinolines catching fire, kids fainting and being abducted in the dark, and workers spontaneously combusting with unregulated revolutionary delight. Soon the critics’ attentions turned to the activities of courting couples who, drunk on the darkness of the cinema auditorium, would cavort while the movies played. Indeed, this concern led to the introduction of ‘daylight projection’, through which films were shown in a darkened alcove above the audience, who remained respectably illuminated below. It didn’t catch on: ‘I have tried the light and dark halls,’ one showman complained, as quoted in Tom Dewe Mathews’s terrifically lively work Censored: The Story of Film Censorship in Britain, ‘and find the public prefer the latter, especially the young couples, who like to see the pictures and have a canoodle at the same time. I found that I lost nearly all the courters – the biggest portion of my patrons – by adopting the lighting principle, and soon went back the old principle.’

  On the front cover of Dewe Mathews’s book, which I have in front of me now, is an image that is striking in ways which the author surely never intended – a pair of scissors, the blades opened to form an ‘X’ shape (like the BBFC rating that had once excitingly denoted ‘adults only’ entertainment), ready to cut and slice celluloid. For decades, scissors were the universally acknowledged visual shorthand for censorship, with every piece published on the subject requiring an accompanying picture of a sturdy pair of stainless steel blades. Such articles would invariably include umpteen alliterative references to ‘the censor’s scissors’, which would be used to ‘snip’ and ‘cut’ key scenes from controversial movies. I should know: I wrote enough of those pieces myself, and eventually had to put an embargo on the overuse of my favourite hackneyed phrases – an embargo which invariably was broken by the end of the second paragraph. Indeed, looking back through my ramshackle collection of press cuttings, I find an early article I wrote about the BBFC for Time Out magazine back in 1989, the masthead of which uses that trusty scissors-variant ‘rusty knife’ (why would a censor’s knife be rusty?), while the opening paragraph features two ‘cuts’, one ‘snipped’, and a fleeting ‘trimmed’. Plus ça change.

  What’s interesting about this habitual slicing vernacular, with its constant references to scissors, knives, cuts, trims and so on, is that it makes no sense whatsoever in the modern digital era. You try editing a digital movie with some form of physical blade and see how far you get. The very idea of anyone merrily setting about a movie with a pair of scissors is rooted in the age-old physicality of celluloid, and harks back to a time when ‘film’ was a physical entity rather than a conceptual conundrum. Nowadays, movies aren’t ‘cut’; they are modified, reformatted and adjusted to fit your screen. If you’ve been to the cinema in the past few months, chances are that what you were watching wasn’t even a ‘film’ at all. More likely it was a stream of electronic information, uploaded on to a server and then beamed on to the screen by a digital projector without ever having passed through the translucent celluloid that once gave the medium of ‘film’ its very name.

  This change was inevitable, and perhaps in the long run it will also be seen as liberating. Much has been gained, no doubt – indeed many of the independent cinemas I love so much have benefitted greatly from the installation of digital projectors, which now stand side by side with their celluloid counterparts, allowing an even greater diversity of programming (under the watchful eye of a trained projectionist). Digital movies are downloadable and therefore don’t need to be shipped around the country (and indeed the world) in bulky containers, which are expensive to transport and clumsy to handle. They don’t catch fire, turn to vinegar or generally degenerate in the manner of celluloid (although DVDs and hard-drive storage systems do appear to have a finite shelf-life, which means that back-up clones are a constant necessity). And, perhaps most importantly, the quality of a digital image is more consistently controllable than that of physical prints, each of which will be subtly different from its siblings – particularly after it’s done the rounds of a few mishandled projectors. I remember very clearly listening with amazement to David Fincher on the DVD extras for his stylish serial-killer thriller Se7en, wherein he claimed that only on this carefully corrected digital imprint would we be guaranteed to see the movie the way he had intended. Apparently the post-production process on Se7en had involved striking some very expensive prints that used a ‘silver retention’ process called CCE, a way of rebonding silver to the celluloid which created a greater contrast between the chasmic darkness and shimmering luminescence of the image. Due to cost restrictions, only some of the prints distributed in the UK were created using this process, meaning that the film you saw in any particular cinema may have been only a pale reflection of Fincher’s original vision. This became the subject of much heated debate in the letters page of Sight & Sound magazine, with cineastes arguing over the definitive authenticity (or otherwise) of particular screenings of the movie. On digital DVD, however, Fincher was able to assure the viewer that every frame had been colour-corrected to within an inch of its life and the frame ratio correctly locked to his exact specifications.

  For cineastes, this is clearly a significant development, and there are similar artistic arguments for digitally projected movies being more controllable than their celluloid ancestors. Yet for me, and for several generations of film-makers and movie-goers, there is still something irresistible about the act of light shining through celluloid, an almost intangible quintessence of cinema that harks back to the superstitions and shadowplays of our forefathers. In his 2010 movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams (which, as I may have mentioned, is clearer, brighter and better in 2-D) Werner Herzog talks about paintings etched onto rock walls being the earliest form of cinema, the drawings of animals animated by the flickering light of a fire which lent the illusion of movement to the static images. There’s an echo of that primitivism buried within every frame of a celluloid film-print, the scars
and scratches of which tell the story of its life and travels. I recall an old friend, Ronan O’Casey, who played the murder victim in Antonioni’s endlessly enigmatic sixties classic Blow-Up, telling me that by the end of the film’s first run in Britain every print had been snipped of a single explicit frame in which an actress’s nethers were fleetingly exposed during a playful romp. The cut wasn’t made by censors (who missed it) but by projectionists who, knowing their way intimately around the prints that passed through their hands, had all kept a little something for themselves. And I still get a thrill thinking of the look on editor Mike Bradsell’s face when I first showed him a reel of film that had been missing from Ken Russell’s The Devils for 30 years, and hearing him exclaim, ‘My God, I recognise the edits!’ Not the edited visuals up there on the screen, you understand, but the physical edits on the reel of film itself. This was something Mike had handled and crafted and pored over for months on end, and now his own cuts and splices were running through the Steenbeck for the first time in three decades, scurrying over the spools to greet him like lively animals released from a cage.

  All of these memories are tied up with the physicality of film – with the tangibility of celluloid and the lusty mechanics of projection. British film-maker Michael Powell understood this addictive appeal when he made Peeping Tom, the film that outraged critics by suggesting that there was something dangerously perverse about a passionate devotion to the cinema. ‘It’s interesting because the fetish ideas are all there in Peeping Tom,’ Martin Scorsese told me on the eve of a 40th-anniversary re-release of Powell’s much-maligned masterpiece. ‘All the elements are there: the projector is correct; the lenses are right; the sprockets are correct. Even the sounds of the sprockets are correct. And there is a point in time, many times over the years … where I’ve loved to hear the sound of film going through a projector. And I could tell you if it’s 35mm or 16mm, you know. It’s like going into a trance almost, or I should say a “meditation” of some kind. And now, of course, that’s gone …’