Which is to say that I have read 50-odd pages of Jonathan Rosenbaum's 'Moving Places: A Life at the Movies' before 9am today. Much of it is familiar, I read a lot of it when writing my PhD (I think it was at the writing stage, rather than researching, as I came across it far too late to admit) although in that capacity you tend to, in the words of my supervisor, 'gut books' rather than properly read them. Reading Rosenbaum here is a testing pleasure: his sensibility is romantic and his experiences are fascinating, although I sometimes feel that the prose style can be a little laboured (more so, it should be added, in 1980 rather than today).
This passage struck me this morning:
Most people would say that film is undergoing a profound transformation. Maybe it is, but where do you draw the line between profound transformation and extinction? What appears to be the survival of movies, at least in this part of the world, is an illusion created by advertising, "distinguished critics" whom you can read in magazines sold in supermarkets enacting their weekly rounds of slavery, and a few lonely theatres in shopping malls that already seem haunted on the day they open - places to buy expensive buttered popcorn whose empty tublike containers rattle under the seats afterward. When the Salk polio vaccine was invented in 1953, shots were administered in children at the Princess. And when Rosenbaum Theatres was sold in 1960, one of the first steps taken by Martin Theatres - apart from raising the ticket prices (an issue on which Bo had refused to budge) and firing most of the employees (including nearly all the black cleaning ladies, who used to come in every morning) - was to remove all the pay phones from the lobbies. No wonder that the lobby at the Shoals today feels neither public nor private. (Jonathan Rosenabum, 'Moving Places', Second edition Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [first published 1980], p. 43).It can be easy to forget - amongst all the DVDs, home cinema, Sky Plus, 3D TV (we went to my Aunt's house yesterday, where they have just purchased a 3D TV. I think I annoyed them by finding the idea that they may sit on the sofa wearing 3D glasses hilarious) - that cinema was the most public of arts. The cinema could screen a film around which a community would orientate itself - a common point of discussion, a shared maker of meaning. As Rosenbaum also points out above, it also fulfilled civic duties that we now perhaps see as fulfilled by a church hall (although that also seems very 1980s) or...or what? I don't know. Film doesn't seem to serve that function any more - or if it does it is for very different types of community (cue the literature about 21st century global cinephilia, Internet and film festivals etc...no time here, I'm sure that Film Studies for Free can hook you up). It is this quality of cinema that led me to write about what I did for my PhD, and to try and give it the polemical quality that I hope it did.
Luc Moullet's 'Les sieges de l'Alcazar'
(slightly irrelevant, but hilarious portrait of cinema as a shared, if exclusive, culture).
And it is a love of this property that, ultimately, is why I have found myself describing myself as a theatre artist - happily, reluctantly, and with some embarrassment at the potential reaction from 'real theatre artists'. The nature of theatre - a collection of people, an audience, sharing a collective experience - satisfies that desire for people to come together and play an active role in their community, in their society and in their world. This is why, ultimately, I don't see the leap (although it's not a leap, it's more a cautious straddle, one foot on each island hoping I don't fall in) from cinema to theatre as that great, as that radical. In casual discussion, people seem to find this move incomprehensible, as if I have just moved the knight piece in a straight line. Of course, the idea that you have your medium and that's that is outdated and nonsensical, but even so I just don't see the two art forms - cinema and theatre - as all that different. They're all about public experiences, and if cinema is currently in a place where it isn't necessarily providing that (although, it is in some circles, circles that I wish to seek out) then I am drawn to theatre (which, of course, is also in some quarters doing its best not to provide that). (And it has had the happy side effect of discovering a great interest in and admiration for actors and acting).
I fear I have taken a different route to end up in a similar, but less rich and complex, place to Chris Goode when he articulated some thoughts about running a theatre a couple of months ago. Anyway, if you didn't read it before, you really ought so treat yourself this Christmas.
As a final P.S, please go and look at my friend Michael Lightborne's Kickstarter project. It's called 'Veils'. I saw some of Michael's work earlier this year in Shoreditch and it was great. He also did some video and sound design for me - going far above and beyond what I had hoped for - when I directed Tape last year.
