"Shared Spaces in Dark Places"
- Mitch Hampton
- Oct 22
- 9 min read
“Only through the actor can the creator express himself, and reach the spectator; how do certain cineastes resist the temptation to act, themselves? Everything must be subordinate to the actor and in fact, ‘like it or not’ does depend on him. Everything has to be a way of reaching the actor, from the camera movements which follow him, to the decor, which reflects him” Jacques Rivette, from “The Act And The Actor “ (1950)
I grew up with movies to a degree that has been startling to me in this current half of a decade in which I am not able to see very many of them. There is a difference between something being a big part of one’s life being lost when the loss is caused by that person embracing something that holds more importance, say, a person who doesn’t go out to the movies because they are a parent. Loss that is chosen because of other gains is different than loss that is unchosen and doesn’t appear to be accompanied by compensatory gains.
However flexible we tell ourselves we are, each of us had harder boundaries around our individual characters that we are wont to imagine. That those boundaries are made by having values to begin with means that some boundaries are inevitable and permanent.
We are always going to prefer either chocolate or vanilla ice cream or be allergic to ice cream altogether, and we are always going to want to read books rather than climb rocks, unless we have equal love of both. Or walk through a wild woods or play a round of golf if these are our pursuits.
It would be the hardest sell to tell any of the people in my examples that they will never play golf again or that they have to learn to dislike ice cream. We have much less in common with each other than we can ever imagine and we learn this when it is quite late, in times of greatest conflict, for example.
One of my favorite books growing up was Pauline Kael’s When The Lights Go Down, which is her collection of responses to the middle to late 70s period of cinema. (Sometimes I feel as if she is doing simply that - responding, as distinct from reviewing, all the movies of those many decades.)
I did not see nearly as many movies during those years as well as the following decade of the 1980s as I would in the 1990s and the first decade and a half of the 20th century. Yet I would have seen more movies than most others in those years and as if taking a lesson from Kael herself, I did concentrate on the screen, though I was doing so as a ten to 14 year old boy and not a 35 year old woman having been in the employ of The New Yorker to so concentrate.
The radical differences between one kind of picture and another was one of the most intriguing and mysterious things to me at that time. It is not so much that I wasn’t learning about my own preferences - in 1977 I liked Sorcerer so much more than Star Wars - it was that I was actually learning how to appreciate and love movies that themselves were different and at odds with one another, not only interns of visual style but assumptions about so-called human nature and psychology,ad what I even worthy of our attentions.
The sole reason for this change - from one or a couple of movies a week to, say, four or five movies a week - was having residence in Boston, which had four or five very good repertory movie theaters. The simplified blurb or tagline that accompanied Kael’s book was “there is nothing quite like that moment when the lights go down and all our hopes are concentrated on the screen.”
The aporetic questions shall remain so long as I occupy this particular slice of culture and time: what does it mean to experience dramatic and constructed works of fiction - or non-fiction - in durational stand alone forms and with others who are mostly strangers?
What does it mean to occupy a single physical space in the dark with these acquaintances?
What does it mean to be in an audience of this kind, as part of a “public” and in front of the kinds of visual plays that themselves never change but are fixed art objects?
What does it mean that after the Covid Time that far less of leisure and culture is experienced in this way and far more of it is experienced in isolated houses or homes?
What does it mean if audience behavior changes greatly in terms of what is considered acceptable during a movie (talking more loudly during the movie, putting bare feet and legs over seats in front of one and so on?)
This post is not the place to fulfill the hopes or promises of such questions, to say nothing of “answers”, but it is a place to remember such questions whenever any of us attempts to recount what reproducible and self contained visual plays or dramas have meant to us over a life. The vogue phrase “third place” is a part of any understanding of these questions but in itself is but only one part.
Months before beginning to write this particular blog I attended a screening of sorts but it was in practically every respect different than than any of the ones I attended in the two decades and a half I was ensconced in the East (save for a couple of exceptions I will mention in a moment).
Instead of a theater or movie palace designed for screenings as intended by filmmakers, studios and distributors this was a homemade makeshift, minimal affair in one of there many anonymous strips that constitute rural and suburban parts of the United States.
We were going to watch Lina Wertmuller’s classic political comedy from the 1970s The Seduction Of Mimi but on a popup projection screen and from some kind of disc that any of us could have screened for ourselves at a t.v. in our own homes.
This is akin to having coffee in a public, commercial coffeehouse while possessing all the updated, higher tech appliances to make a decent, serviceable coffee in one’s own home. A large point of watching a movie in a public, darkened space is not only the (hopeful) largeness of the screen presentation but to watch it with a large group of other people who might be complete strangers as much as acquaintances and closer friends. Everybody is focused on one point in space, every individual experiencing and interpreting the same reproduced imagery and sound in a unique, never to be reproduced fashion.
And all of these considerations are part of the largest period of time and cultural and social organizations, including the technology that is used to create any art object. Once when filmmaker Ross McElwee introduced his film Charleen and the film appeared to break, or the projection went awry, he announced that “we’re having a 1970s experience”.
(This feature makes it for me profoundly different than even live theater with actors present: the electronic reproducibility of the film means that the world of art becomes much more of a “Rorcharch Test” for a society as the object - much a like fixed, published novel - never changes. Moviegoing is a way of being with others without the demanding intimacy of direct, facial communication).
Over a period of thirty years I attended so many hundreds of screenings; some of these were led by the creators of the films themselves: some standout appearances were Monte Hellman, Elaine May and Stanley Donen, William Friedkin, Kathryn Bigelow presenting the not yet released The Hurt Locker, Arthur Penn presenting Night Moves, and Jeffrey Schatzberg presenting Puzzle Of A Downfall Child.
When I was living in Boston and a dedicated member of the Harvard Film Archive, there was a retrospective of her films during which Wertmuller was to make an appearance (possibly with her partner, the brilliant designer Enrico Job, as well).
Audio from this special Harvard Archive event for you to enjoy as well: https://harvardfilmarchive.org/conversations/85
Unfortunately Wertmuller was unable to make the trip to the United States to attend, making her a great director I was unable to meet in person.
Had she attended that would have been a highlight of my life and yet there is something about seeing her Seduction Of Mimi in a suburban strip mall on a rainy and gloomy Asheville night that was as joyous as seeing one of her films in one of the most famous theaters in the world with the director present. This has something to do with the energies of a particular audience.
With an audience you are hearing and feeling the vibe of how different people responded to Wertmuller’s comedy and explicitly anti-capitalist politics, some younger, some older audiences, and some for the very first time and possibly unfamiliar with her 1970s Italian comedies and her frank and crude vision of human sexuality.
I really don’t think this is the most important part of an art object: bluntly put, audiences can be “wrong" in so many ways. They can be ignorant, or uneducated and simply insensitive to any art object - but the art object is always the same object with whatever audience and with passing time periods, generations, eras and epochs. Accordingly it has an integrity that is autonomous and free from any public opinion while at the same time being dependent on that opinion.
There are certain art objects that are simply designed for some kind of audience. But the thousands year old experience of witnessing a durational art object “in public” is clearly meeting some kind of need that cannot be duplicated in privacy. I happen to think it might have commonality with the gathering of religious service.
For a more recent example of the accomplished people in the filmed arts.
Here is the autograph of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang when he screened his masterpiece (and one of the greatest odes to the movies I have experienced) Goodbye Dragon Inn.
I recount all of this with the background of having seen Meryl Streep and her partner John Cazale in Measure For Measure in New York City and seeing Star Wars and Annie Hall both on opening weekends. The culture of going out to some kind of theater or another seemed to me something that would always be there.
I was a child when I had those experiences but had you asked me, say, twenty years later, in the middle 1990s, whether I had considered the possibility that the entire system of the distribution and production of dramatic art - whether filmed or performed in person - would be overthrown and challenged in any way by the computer or by the desire to not leave the house, I would have thought such an historic and sociological change an impossibility, something fantastical to consider - as if Civilization itself would have ended and we were cooking over open fires.
And this would have been the conclusion of someone who knew Faith Popcorn’s prediction of what she called “cocooning” in the 1980s (I had actually “interviewed” her around that time) and someone who had some experience of the nature of television viewing which is all bout one’s home.
For a rather brief period in the 1980s, I would actually host VCR parties and simply stick these large black tapes into this machine. I usually inflicted my own tastes upon the few who would join. They of course liked to drink and smoke some kind of herb of one kind or another and I never did any of those things but I did curate the party.
Sometimes if a movie had been really long by conventional standards of duration you would have it broken up into more than one cassette tape: Celine And Julie Go Boating was a particularly memorable screening, mainly vacate some people fell asleep before Tape Part One had even finished.
When Gene Hackman died this year I had to remember when I showed The Conversation and the girlfriend of a bassist I with whom I was playing music started sobbing at the plight of Harry Caul’s character.
“It’s so deeply sad.”
This was most likely the party scene in the loft with all of the wiretappers and their hired girls and the great Allen Garfield bullying and goading Gene Hackman with such merciless brutality. Not only can movies teach you that movies have the right be so different amongst themselves but they can reveal so much about human emotions and, of course, emotions in a social context.
I never really thought about any of this at the time; I was a cinephile trying to spread the work about Jacques Rivette or something by Francis Coppola other than Godfather 2.
Human beings appear to be close to maximally flexible, even perversely so: just as mating practices have abolished the ubiquitous 20th century practice of the bar and coffee house in favor of one computer internet site or another so too have have the practices of “going out” greatly diminished in frequency and importance. Entire lifestyles can come and go of course and it might simply be the case that one generation or more happens to occupy a time in which a lifestyle is said to simply exist. These are matters about which none of us can know with certainty; we make our best guess.
The world of arts and letters, in least in the form in which I personally can be said to respect them might be a fragile thing indeed, which might be one reason for this podcast as well as posts like the one you have now read.
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Thank you Mitch!