Peter Bradshaw: Glory of the Dream-house
Peter Bradshaw: Television was supposed to kill off cinema, so how come movie admissions are the highest for 30 years?
This Sunday, film fans in the United States - which means just about everyone in the United States, will be settling down in front of the TV for an Oscar-night party. The eight-hour LA time-lag means this tradition has never caught on here, but there are still quite a lot of hollow-eyed people ready to make an all-nighter of it for BBC2's live coverage of the 74th annual Academy Awards.
There has never been a better time for this. Going to the cinema is more popular in Britain than it's been for a generation. People have been predicting the slow death of movie-going ever since the invention of television, but not only does it refuse to lie down, it's more vibrant than ever. Last year, according to the Cinema Advertising Association, the number of admissions were at 158 million, the highest since the heady days of The Godfather, 30 years ago. We're a nation of popcorn-munching, coke-slurping, celluloid headbangers, scrambling in for the start of the programme, smirking our way through the ads, mentally playing beat-the-intro with the trailers and hugging ourselves with excitement.
How come? After all, there are all these sexy reasons for cocooning and staying at home. You've got your Xboxes, DVD players and zillions of TV channels on digital and satellite. Who needs cinema?
The answer is: we all do. The communal experience of going to the cinema is still an unbeatable thrill. And - bemoan the neglect of world cinema as we may - no one knows how to package that thrill quite like Hollywood. Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, Shrek, Bridget Jones's Diary, all these pictures were "event movies" whose D-Day launch schedules made tidal waves outside the world of cinema itself. Furthermore, Hollywood loves us Brits as never before, with a bushel of home-grown names up for Oscars: Tom Wilkinson, Jim Broadbent, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren. We're almost bound to wake up on Monday to a "Brit Oscar triumph" news story. All this gets cinema talked about in the UK, and gets people into the multiplexes by the truckload.
The vast market for movies on video and DVD served to stimulate interest in the prime experience of cinema-going itself. Moreover, there is a creeping sense of disappointment in the much-promised cornucopia of digital and satellite TV. It contains a lot of ropey programming and soft porn, and you can get that on Channel 5.
Then there is the theatre, which over the years has lost out to the movies in the cultural conversation. Cinema is taken ever more seriously as art. Despite many wonderful evenings at the theatre, I have tended to become the cultural equivalent of a non-churchgoing Anglican: a non-theatregoing theatregoer. I still respect and admire the great practitioners, and of course there are some great shows out there, but going to the theatre can be a strangely unrelaxed business.
At the cinema, everyone gets the same experience for six or seven pounds: modern auditoria, comfortable, reasonably spaced seats, hi-tech sound. At the theatre, particularly the big West End venues in their Edwardian and Victorian buildings, you get cramped seats, draughty auditoria, rotten acoustics, diabolical sightlines. You get that most pernicious of theatre inventions, the "interval" (so that the bar can make a few bob) at which there can be no topic of conversation but the play, of which you have seen only half. Then there's the caste-system of seat pricing: typified by the grim experience of going to a West End theatre with a (notionally) cheap upper circle ticket, being turned away and told to enter through a side door and toil up some dingy and horrible stairwell. Sod this for a game of cultural consumption, you may well conclude, I'm going to the pictures.
There is a C Day Lewis poem of 1938 called Newsreel, a bitter denunciation of the complacency and anaesthesia induced by the masses' popular cinema-drug, while the world stood on the brink. It begins:
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.
For all its intentional irony and unintentional condescension, the poem is spot-on about the moviegoing experience. The darkness is like being swathed in fur; it's a deeply sensual experience. You go into a light, floating trance looking at the screen. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who loved to sit at the very front of the old Cambridge Arts Cinema so the screen flooded his field of vision, would say ecstatically to his companion: "This is like a showerbath!" Moviegoing isn't perfect of course. Despite more indie-arthouse venues opening up, the bill of fare is still too narrow. Chatterboxes like Wittgenstein have to be told to shut up, and we should bring back the cat or perhaps the rope for persistent mobile phone offenders.
But it is still a sublimely wonderful way of spending an evening. I may stay up all night on Sunday after all.
Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.
p.bradshaw@btinternet.com
There has never been a better time for this. Going to the cinema is more popular in Britain than it's been for a generation. People have been predicting the slow death of movie-going ever since the invention of television, but not only does it refuse to lie down, it's more vibrant than ever. Last year, according to the Cinema Advertising Association, the number of admissions were at 158 million, the highest since the heady days of The Godfather, 30 years ago. We're a nation of popcorn-munching, coke-slurping, celluloid headbangers, scrambling in for the start of the programme, smirking our way through the ads, mentally playing beat-the-intro with the trailers and hugging ourselves with excitement.
How come? After all, there are all these sexy reasons for cocooning and staying at home. You've got your Xboxes, DVD players and zillions of TV channels on digital and satellite. Who needs cinema?
The answer is: we all do. The communal experience of going to the cinema is still an unbeatable thrill. And - bemoan the neglect of world cinema as we may - no one knows how to package that thrill quite like Hollywood. Harry Potter, Lord Of The Rings, Shrek, Bridget Jones's Diary, all these pictures were "event movies" whose D-Day launch schedules made tidal waves outside the world of cinema itself. Furthermore, Hollywood loves us Brits as never before, with a bushel of home-grown names up for Oscars: Tom Wilkinson, Jim Broadbent, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren. We're almost bound to wake up on Monday to a "Brit Oscar triumph" news story. All this gets cinema talked about in the UK, and gets people into the multiplexes by the truckload.
The vast market for movies on video and DVD served to stimulate interest in the prime experience of cinema-going itself. Moreover, there is a creeping sense of disappointment in the much-promised cornucopia of digital and satellite TV. It contains a lot of ropey programming and soft porn, and you can get that on Channel 5.
Then there is the theatre, which over the years has lost out to the movies in the cultural conversation. Cinema is taken ever more seriously as art. Despite many wonderful evenings at the theatre, I have tended to become the cultural equivalent of a non-churchgoing Anglican: a non-theatregoing theatregoer. I still respect and admire the great practitioners, and of course there are some great shows out there, but going to the theatre can be a strangely unrelaxed business.
At the cinema, everyone gets the same experience for six or seven pounds: modern auditoria, comfortable, reasonably spaced seats, hi-tech sound. At the theatre, particularly the big West End venues in their Edwardian and Victorian buildings, you get cramped seats, draughty auditoria, rotten acoustics, diabolical sightlines. You get that most pernicious of theatre inventions, the "interval" (so that the bar can make a few bob) at which there can be no topic of conversation but the play, of which you have seen only half. Then there's the caste-system of seat pricing: typified by the grim experience of going to a West End theatre with a (notionally) cheap upper circle ticket, being turned away and told to enter through a side door and toil up some dingy and horrible stairwell. Sod this for a game of cultural consumption, you may well conclude, I'm going to the pictures.
There is a C Day Lewis poem of 1938 called Newsreel, a bitter denunciation of the complacency and anaesthesia induced by the masses' popular cinema-drug, while the world stood on the brink. It begins:
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.
For all its intentional irony and unintentional condescension, the poem is spot-on about the moviegoing experience. The darkness is like being swathed in fur; it's a deeply sensual experience. You go into a light, floating trance looking at the screen. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who loved to sit at the very front of the old Cambridge Arts Cinema so the screen flooded his field of vision, would say ecstatically to his companion: "This is like a showerbath!" Moviegoing isn't perfect of course. Despite more indie-arthouse venues opening up, the bill of fare is still too narrow. Chatterboxes like Wittgenstein have to be told to shut up, and we should bring back the cat or perhaps the rope for persistent mobile phone offenders.
But it is still a sublimely wonderful way of spending an evening. I may stay up all night on Sunday after all.
Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.
p.bradshaw@btinternet.com
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