The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  For Scorsese, this meditative or trance-like state that even the sound of celluloid passing over sprockets can induce is part of what he calls ‘the pathology, the obsession, the compulsion of cinema’. It’s a compulsion that Scorsese recognises as an intrinsic element of the cinematic urge, summed up in one blackly comic line from Leo Marks’s script for Peeping Tom, in which one of the killer’s acquaintances mutters ominously: ‘All this filming isn’t healthy …’

  ‘A friend of mine sent me that line on a note when we were making Raging Bull!’ Scorsese told me. ‘I think it was one of the cinematographers who’d just seen Peeping Tom. And there is no doubt that [film-making] is aggressive and it could be something that is not very healthy. When you make a film … there are times in your life when you’re burning with a passion and it’s very, very strong. It’s almost like a pathology of cinema where you want to possess the people on film. You want to live through them. You want to possess their spirits, their souls, in a way.’

  This idea of the possession of the soul being tied up with the alchemical process of light on celluloid is as old as photography itself. Some cultures still regard the taking of photographs as being an inherently weakening experience, with the subject spiritually compromised by the capture of their image. Others believe that it is possible to take ‘soul photographs’ – a peculiar branch of ectoplasmic entrapment which suggests that the camera can see what the eye cannot. Kenneth Anger thought his experimental films were ‘spells’ rather than ‘movies’, while the evangelist Billy Graham declared that there was ‘evil’ embodied in the very celluloid of The Exorcist. No wonder the amiable seventies shlocker The Omen used the popular fear of photography as a key plot device, with shadowy shapes bisecting the forms of Satan’s future victims showing up on a shutterbug’s prints: look, there’s the nanny who hangs herself with the suggestion of a rope around her neck; there’s Patrick Troughton’s bedraggled priest with a dark line running from shoulder to thigh, alluding to the church-tower spike that will skewer him like a kebab; and (most memorably) there’s David Warner with a thick black line that prefigures him losing his head after an unfortunate encounter with a truck laden with plate glass.

  This sense that the soul and celluloid are somehow intertwined remains as powerful for some of today’s leading film-makers as it was for the photographic pioneers who first captured the moving image over 100 years ago. Despite the ubiquitous rise of digital projection, Quentin Tarantino insisted as recently as 2010 that his sprawling Second World War epic Inglourious Basterds (in which explosive nitrate stock is used as a weapon against Hitler) be distributed on 35mm film, clearly believing that the message of his movie was somehow embedded in the medium – in the magic of celluloid. Such affection for celluloid, with all its attendant dangers and degenerative shortcomings, is surprisingly common among directors of a certain age, even those who understand that the battle with digital has already been lost. As Spielberg told me with an almost heartbreaking sense of melancholy: ‘I will rue the day when I too will be forced to conform, when theatres convert to digital projection and I’ll have to convert as well. And I’ll be the last to convert. But my company won’t. My company will be at the forefront of the conversion because I can’t stop progress. But as a film-maker when I still have final cut and I still have the final choice of mediums with which to make my movies, I’ll always select film.’

  ‘I’ve had the chance to make up some amazing old films,’ projectionist Sam Clements told Time Out magazine in their piece about the inevitable decline of celluloid. ‘Recently I had original prints of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Stalker. They had frames missing where something may have gone wrong during playback or a projectionist had nabbed a still for their collection. For me, it’s amazing to hold the print and think that it was being screened before I was born. These films have their own history, and that’s something you can never replicate with digital …’

  Clements works at the Brixton Ritzy (another fine cinema) and reading his words reminded me of a peculiar encounter I’d had in the foyer of the Hendon Odeon several decades earlier, during the interval of a Ben-Hur re-run. I was watching the film for the second time because, in terms of pence-per-minute entertainment, this was the best-value ticket I had ever bought. The film had everything: action, romance, intrigue, wild animals, stunning vistas, religion, big men in loincloths, gladiator fights, Charlton Heston’s chest, revolutionary political speeches, a harrumphing score, and a chariot race during the filming of which someone had actually died. Really. That’s dangerous cinema for you. For sheer thunderous spectacle that film was pretty hard to top, and frankly I was glad of the mid-way toilet break that the word ‘Intermission’ once signalled. Films don’t have intermissions anymore because, thanks to ever more automated projection, the films themselves don’t need them – although my bladder still does. But apparently multiplex cinemas are thoroughly against intermissions since they require an usher on hand to allow people in and out of the screening, and (as we know) ushers are now rarer than decent Michael Bay films. Although surely the extra popcorn sales would more than cover their salaries …?

  Anyway, making sure to leave a jacket on my left-side aisle seat to prevent any person with evil intentions from slipping in there whilst I was away, I headed off to the restrooms (or ‘gents’ as they were known back then) and thence to the foyer to peruse the cardboard boxes of chocolate-coated stale nuts and raisins we encountered in Chapter Four. As I loitered by the counter (I had no money and was merely window shopping) a somewhat older gentleman sidled up to me and attempted to engage me in conversation in a manner that today would be probably be viewed as rather creepy. Everyone of my age remembers hanging around outside A-certificate films waiting for strange men to ‘accompany’ them to the ticket office in order to gain admittance to films that required ‘a responsible adult’. Anyway, this particular grown-up seemed harmless enough, and only wanted to talk about the movie. Clearly he was desperate to find someone with whom to share his thoughts and, as luck would have it, he found me. And so we talked a little about the movie – about William Wyler’s direction and Heston’s chest, and the stories of on-set deaths that always accompanied a genuine epic. And we talked about the first time he had seen the movie, back in 1959 in a cinema in Leicester to which he had gone with his wife, who was sadly no longer with us. Apparently she had been a big fan of ‘Chuck’ Heston (I had never heard anyone call him ‘Chuck’ before), and in particular his chest. I asked if she’d ever seen Planet of the Apes, in which his chest was equally prominent, and the man replied that she hadn’t but that she did like The Ten Commandments even though he mostly kept his shirt on in that one. (Writing this conversation down now, it sounds a lot creepier than it did back in 1972; I think something is getting lost in the translation.)

  After a while an announcement came over the Tannoy telling us all to gather up our chocolate-coated stale nuts and raisins and make our way back to the auditorium, where the second half of the main feature was about to commence. I worried briefly that the gentleman whose wife had liked Charlton Heston’s chest would wish to accompany me to my seat, but no; he was right at the back on the right-hand side of the auditorium, and I was on a middle aisle seat on the left and so we went our separate ways. But as we parted he said something that has stayed with me ever since:

  ‘He looks so young.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Heston. Chuck Heston. He looks so young.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, thinking myself very cineliterate and quite the film connoisseur. ‘He was young when he made Ben-Hur. Comparatively. I mean, he was in his thirties back then. I think he’s pushing fifty now. He looked a lot older in Planet of the Apes. Although his teeth looked the same.’

  The man, whose name I can’t remember (if indeed he ever told me), looked a little cross and disgruntled, as if I’d somehow blown the otherwise pleasantly nerdy conversation we seemed to have been having up until that point.

  ‘Well of course he wa
s younger then,’ he said with a hint of exasperation. ‘But that’s not what I meant. I meant that my wife and I saw this film when it first came out, back before you were born, young man. And since then I’ve gotten older and she’s passed on, and the film has clearly had a few too many birthdays of its own. But Chuck looks just the same. He hasn’t aged a bit.’

  And with that he headed back off into the auditorium to take his seat and (I imagine) resume a date with the dearly departed love of his life, who had been waiting patiently for him to return with chocolate raisins.

  I thought about this a lot as the second half of the movie played – about the way that film had captured a moment in time but had continued to age itself. And I started to wonder whether the print of the movie we were watching there in the Hendon Odeon in the early seventies was the same print he and his wife had seen projected 15 years before in a cinema in Leicester. It almost certainly wasn’t; Ben-Hur had enjoyed a widespread tenth-anniversary re-release in 1969, and the print we were watching was very likely newly struck for re-run distribution. But this print was definitely far from perfect (it did indeed look like it had celebrated ‘a few too many birthdays’), and with every scratch and flicker that played upon the screen I wondered about the glamorous life it had led prior to winding up here for a Sunday matinee at the Hendon Odeon. Even in the relatively few years that I had been going to the cinema, I had become familiar with the jumps and bumps of films I’d seen more than once, in the same way that one becomes intimately acquainted with the scratches and needle skips on a well-worn vinyl LP. After a while I would come to recognise and cherish those defining marks, in the same way that one cherishes the lines on the face of a loved one who becomes more beautiful with age precisely because such lines tell the story of their life.

  Today, films have discovered a form of cinematic Botox that prevents such ageing. But, just as the timelessness of Dorian Gray’s outer beauty led to the casual destruction of his inner soul, so the advent of ageless digital information has also allowed cinemas to throw off the last shackles of their responsibility to the audience, and indeed to the movies themselves. Compare the experience of watching that fragile and faded 30-year-old print of Silent Running as it was painstakingly escorted through the projector in Leeds to the experience of watching a perfectly colour-corrected and all-but-indestructible digital print of some family-friendly blockbuster which is misaligned on the screen from the outset but which the projectionist is never able to correct because he or she is too busy tending to the on–off switch in the next screen.

  This is the engine of the modern multiplex: a computer programme with no memory of the past, no human interaction, no history, no soul. We did away with celluloid because it needed too much care and replaced it with a stream of digital information about which no one cares. We handed the control of our ticket purchases over to speak-your-weight machines only to discover that they were actually running the whole cinema. And while we were all so busy squinting at pointy digital images through smudgy 3-D glasses we didn’t notice the lights going off in the projection box behind us …

  ‘There’s something magical,’ the 60-year-old Steven Spielberg had wistfully told me in that 2006 interview, ‘about having something as primitive-sounding today as twenty-four pictures a second moving past a shutter gate with a light beam projecting on a big silver or white screen. It’s magic. And it’s our forefathers. The films we love the most were made in this process. It was good enough for them, why isn’t it still good enough for us?’

  Why indeed?

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  During the writing of this book, I called regularly upon the expertise and assistance of others whose detailed knowledge of cinema is far greater than mine. Each of them contributed immeasurably to the finished book, and I would like to thank:

  Linda Ruth Williams, my partner, friend and inspiration whose original ideas I continue to pass off as my own, and without whom I could not write a single coherent sentence. Ever.

  Hedda Archbold at Hidden Flack, my trusted friend and colleague who speaks both Dutchish and Swedish, but who doesn’t know how to say ‘No, that can’t be done’ in any language.

  Nigel Wilcockson at Random, who helped me find the book I was trying to write, and without whose excellent editing I would have come a real cropper on several occasions.

  Gemma Wain at Random, for her meticulous proofing, and for using the phrase ‘I love doing corrections!’ in such a deadpan manner that I still can’t tell if she’s being ironic.

  Tim Clifford, whose extensive Index is a thing of beauty, and is also arguably a better read – punchier, pithier, more elegant – than the book itself (read it and see …).

  Bryony Dixon, Curator of Silent Film at the BFI, for explaining the difference between ‘gun powder’ and ‘gun cotton’, and for handling my manuscript with as much care and attention as a can of nitrate film.

  Boyd Hilton, editor at Heat and one half of my favourite critical double bill (Floyd and Boyd), for leading me through the maze of box-office figures, and for knowing far more about screen ratios than I ever expected.

  Kim Newman, for running his encyclopaedic eye over the manuscript and picking up several embarrassing errors en route, and for knowing the correct title(s) for Saw 3-D.

  David Norris, the ‘last projectionist standing’, for his invaluable insights into a magical world of cogs, pulleys and dowsers that continues to mystify and amaze me.

  Tomoke Yabe, for being my guide through a foreign culture, for introducing me to the joys of ‘Engrish’, and for making cakes that appear to have their own gravitational field.

  And finally to Georgia and Gabriel Willams, for going to the cinema with their dad, and for being a credit to their mum.

  INDEX

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  1941 (1979) 101–102

  2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 30, 207

  3-D films

  anaglyph 3-D 132–3, 138

  backlash against 162–3

  colour saturation, loss of 148, 186–7

  conversion of 2-D films to 3-D 126, 128, 155–7, 164

  Goebbels’ love of 133

  lenticular screen 3-D 137

  miniaturisation effect 141, 165

  parallax effect 123, 142, 156

  polarised 3-D 133, 138, 155, 160

  role in switch from film to digital 10

  screen brightness, loss of 123, 158–9

  use of 3-D lenses on 2-D films 159–60

  ‘57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)’ (song) 284

  À bout de souffle (1960) 179–80

  A Couple of Dicks (original title of Cop Out) 190

  Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) 220–3, 226, 230, 232, 238, 251

  Adam Ant 147

  Adams, Douglas 26

  Adventures of Pluto Nash, The (2002) 105–6

  Affleck, Ben 71

  ‘Afternoon Delight’ (song) 191

  Alamo, The (2004) 106

  Alba, Jessica 256

  Alfredson, Tomas 252–4

  Alice in Wonderland (2010) 128, 156–7

  Allen, Irwin 99

  Allen, Woody 34, 44, 104,197

  Alley, Kirstie 194

  Alves, Joe 142

  Amalric, Mathieu 42

  Amazon (website) 258

  AMC Loews, Boston Common 160

  Amenábar, Alejandro 109

  American Gigolo (1980) 90

  Amores Perros (2000) 246

  AMPAS see Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

  An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil 71

  Anatomy of the Movies, The (book) 80

  Anger, Kenneth 306

  Animal, The (2001) 196

  Annie Hall (1977) 44, 86

  Antichrist (2009) 248

  Antonioni, Michelangelo
235, 299, 304

  Arlen, Richard 147

  Arnold, Andrea 152, 233

  Arnold, Jack 134

  Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) 128

  Arrival of the Mail Train, The (1896) 128

  Artist, The (2011) 152

  Ashley, Laura 237

  Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The (2007) 217

  Astaire, Fred 44

  Astor Theatre, New York 132

  Auburn, David 257

  Audioscopiks (1935) 133

  Audition aka Ôdishon (2000) 271

  automated ticket booking 19–20, 26–35

  autostereoscopy 161

  Avatar (2009) 100, 113, 133, 139, 154–6, 158, 162, 165

  Avengers, The (1998) 201, 203

  Bach, Stephen 91

  Backdraft (1991), theme park attraction based on 117

  Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The (2009) 193

  Baez, Joan 296

  BAFTA see British Academy of Film and Television Arts

  Baghban (2003) 282

  Ballard, J.G. 66, 218

  Band, Charles 140

  Barbican Centre, London 147

  Barkham, Patrick 10

  Barry Lyndon (1975) 7

  Barton Fink (1991) 148

  Basic Instinct (1991) 201

  Batman Begins (2005) 108, 236