At the end of this year, movie studios are scheduled to stop delivering physical 35mm film prints to theaters for exhibition. Most if not all multiplexes have already made the expensive jump to digital projection, and generally seem to do a decent job—at least to these eyes—of projecting new films. There certainly is a different “feel” to digitally projected motion pictures, in the same way that there was a different “feel” to music CDs versus the experience of vinyl LPs.
There will likely always be vinyl enthusiasts, but the long-playing record will never re-emerge as the standard for the production and distribution of music. The same will be true for movies—and not just for their distribution and exhibition, but for their production as well. There are still filmmakers devoted to working with celluloid, but the time will come when authoring works of cinema with physical film will not just be an unusual choice, but an extremely rare one.
Whether or not movie theaters vanish forever is a different beast altogether.
An expansive definition of the live theatre experience requires only that performer and audience member meet in the exact same “empty space”—be it an auditorium stage, or outdoor park, or room, or elsewhere. These days, we are likewise forced to expand our idea of motion pictures, fully enjoyable now by way of any number of distribution mechanisms: in a multiplex auditorium, in a well-maintained art house theater, on your widescreen, high-definition television at home, on your computer…and yes, even on your smartphone, an experience that in its own way harkens back to the days of the nickelodeon parlor.
Each of these new spaces where the viewer’s eyes and the movie meet were seen as grave threats to the movie theater. Just as the invention of television was perceived to herald its imminent demise, so too did the emergence of—
videotapes;
digital video discs;
video rental stores;
high-definition television; and
Internet video streaming
–come each with their own predictions of certain doom for the communal practice of “taking in a picture” with others on the big screen. While the ritual has evolved (in ways that are irritating to many, to say the least), it has also remained.
Is there anything that can actually make the big-screen movie experience go away for good?
Yes. This:
I finally got to catch up with the indie feature In a World… the other week. The film has been very well received as a comic riff on the voiceover business (the title of writer/director/star Lake Bell’s production refers to the start of all the thousands of movie trailers you’ve seen where the voiceover artist—probably the late Don LaFontaine—gravely intoned those words) and an accessible ode to feminist politics. The picture had finally come out of Center City, Philadelphia, where I like to go for the films but loathe the hassle and expense of parking, and into one of the local arthouses where my commute is leaner and the parking cheaper: the Bala.
The Bala is a charming venue, if in need of a little sprucing up. It’s been around since 1926, and you can read a concise and interesting history of it here on the Cinema Treasures site. In a World… was playing on one of the smaller screens (the Bala was long ago tri-plexed) and there was a decent crowd. I’m not exactly a spring chicken, but I was definitely one of the youngest viewers in attendance during this Sunday matinee.
The lights went down and…a Blu-ray player’s logo came up on the screen. And then, without any fuss of trailers or commercials, the movie started. The theater was playing this film on a Blu-ray disc.
Now, take another look at that picture above.
To add to my disappointment of the film being exhibited with the inferior resolution of this home-video device (which, at home, it must be said, is superlative and far superior to DVD), the actual illumination of the picture was probably half of the proper brightness. Wish I’d had my light meter with me, I might have been tempted to walk up to the screen, take a measurement, Martin Scorsese-style, and show it to the manager. (Like that would have done any good)
It was like watching the ghost of a movie. It was shameful.
Hard for me to say whether or not this grossly inadequate presentation overly influenced anyone’s enjoyment of the film. It’s a comedy, but I heard very little laughter in the audience. As for me, I was disappointed in the movie for its forced quirk and what I felt was a blatant torpedoing of its well-intended feminist message in the climactic minutes, but I’m pretty secure in feeling I separated that judgment from the bad projection issue.
Bye-bye, Bala, at least until your ownership obtains the resources and equipment to exhibit cinema properly. I left the theater more sad than angry. The building is attractive, and if they got their act together, they could enjoy a renaissance much like the Ambler, which is outfitted with proper equipment and does a bang-up job with repertory cinema.
Maybe the Bala is struggling financially. Ownership has changed hands a few times, and they’re now under the control of a company called Reel Cinema. I have no idea what the behind-the-scenes situation is there, but they’d be foolish not to mount a capital campaign of some sort to get the place up to speed. It’d be a real loss for the theater to go out of business. Unless that’s their goal—in which case, they’re going about it exactly the right way, by maintaining the shoddiest of standards in showing films that, ironically, need the highest of them intact in order to thrive against 800-pound blockbuster gorillas.
Car company Honda’s “Project Drive-In” is contributing a bit to the rescue of the drive-in, which is also greatly imperiled by the discontinuing of film prints; arthouse theaters across the country are no doubt fighting to remain lively and relevant, too, and many of them have started up excellent repertory programs and raised the necessary funds to upgrade their equipment in order to exhibit films properly.
The communal moviegoing experience is worth protecting, not just for the sake of watching new films, but now for the value of new generations of moviegoers permitted to connect with classic pictures “the way they were meant to be seen”—in a theater, in the dark, with a crowd.
Funny how seeing a poorly presented movie about the heirs to “the voice of God”—one of Don LaFontaine’s nicknames—would be the screening where I felt the upsetting prospect of this tradition disappearing come to me like a divine, dire warning. In a world where movie theaters have vanished, the art of motion pictures will be irrevocably diminished.
