It must be some form of idiosyncrasy or it must be a fixation. Or it’s the former cinema student in me that has been brainwashed by manuals written by conceited scholars and critics. Whatever it is, I can’t restrain myself. Should I? I haven’t signed a deal with anybody and this site isn’t supposed to be only about the good, but also about the so-so and the bad of my experience in a new country. Here I am talking about the partial disappointment I got from my first experiences with going to the cinema in Reykjavík. Leaving aside comments about the genre of films in program — not much variety, mainly high budget US flicks or local productions; after all, from what I could gather, the only typology of cinema here is the multiplex — I would like to spend a couple of words, on the terrible habits that are the standard in film fruition in Iceland.
In my hometown, a godforsaken dot on the map where culture and other highly dignified values are not taken into account as important elements in the formation of the individual character, whenever I set foot on the sticky soil of the only cinema, I was sure it was going to be a nerve-wrecking experience. The fact is the staff in charge of that cinema was completely disrespectful of the object called film, being it art product or mere consumer product. Not that they offered the audience too many opportunities to learn the difference between the two notions. It made no difference to them what kind of film they were going to show, and to me too, but for different and opposed reasons: they never started on time, they used to have a long break around the middle of the film, they used to cut the ending credits every time. And I used to get mad on regular basis, since I had been taught all these things are wrong if you are a serious and professional film exhibitor. I imagined that whoever committed any of these crimes against a film was supposed to go to hell, where devils with Orson Welles’ features – very likely in his Quinlan’s incarnation – would torture him, making him watch endlessly ending credits on loop. These criminals were not completely to blame though, as in our town the cinema was always empty, with the only exception of Christmas day or when some terrific blockbuster was released – epochal events for the masses like the recent Avatar, that is. Why would they let two spectators — usually Harry and I — watch five or more minutes of ending credits when it was time to close? Why would they avoid having a ten-minute break and earn more chicken feed, since they couldn’t make enough to keep the ship afloat with tickets alone?
In general, the Italian industry isn’t very respectful of the object called film, and along with it of all the people working in the creative process of making it. Who cares what’s the name of all those set decorators and technicians or who’s the composer of the film score? Who reads those names anyway? And what about independent films? What are they? Why would anybody right in their minds want to distribute them? People only like big hits or local productions in any case: nobody can be entertained reading subtitles or watching a film where nobody speaks your language, where nobody blasts a car or where Nicole Kidman doesn’t show her butt; only nerdy weirdos could watch this freaky stuff. However, in bigger cities or in countries very conscientious about the importance of respecting and preserving every cultural product, as it is fair and well-deserved, film distributors and exhibitors are not all brutes only trying to make as much money as possible out of their profession. Films are screened in the best possible conditions, without arbitrary interruptions that don’t take into account the film and its structure, without cuts and other forms of butchery. France is probably one of the most attentive countries in this regard, though the ways films are treated can vary a lot depending on the single cinema’s management. Thankfully, being morally upright in one’s profession goes beyond geographical restrictions.
Before actually moving to Iceland, I had only a vague idea of the type of films consumption in the country. Since I knew among Icelanders there are so many artists and men of letters and, in general, there’s a higher rate of culture than in many other countries I’ve been to, I assumed the general mindset to be that of great deference, thus I was expecting that mindset would be reflected on the kind of fruition on the audience’s part. Wrong assumption. Apparently, Icelanders revert to a childlike state when they enter a cinema.
I was — and still am — baffled. It’s not that people are noisy or particularly annoying, but in cinemas there is an unsettling kind of atmosphere, a disturbing mix of innocent playfulness and Pavlovian conditioning. The film is only part of the experience the spectator in Iceland takes into consideration when going to the movies. The others — the social motivation, the sweets and sodas consumption, etc. — are all equally important, apparently, and I can’t say why it must be so. It’s as if the film isn’t enough to keep the local moviegoer busy: the Icelander needs food and beverage and company as well to be fully satisfied, he recreates around himself the setting one would expect at a fun fair or at an amusement park. And the most disturbing thing of all in my opinion is the vicious circle that from this attitude is generated and established: the one involving not only the audience but the exhibitor and also all the world gravitating around those two poles — from big companies to local businesses and manufacturers — influencing one another at the expenses of the film itself, the only true victim. The film is not, as one would expect, the absolute protagonist, but a simple accessory. Knowing the audience’s eagerness to consume goods, the exhibitor will give great predominance to breaks and idle times, inflating them to the point of absurdity à la Waiting for Godot, and all the work of the theater’s personnel will revolve around this; the companies will be more and more interested in investing in advertising for their services and goods, acquiring more power in proportion to their investments; the audience, exposed nonstop to the ads, will feel even more prone to consumption of the promoted goods, getting up at once when the lights will be on during the interval to get a refill and leaving nonchalantly just after the ending credits will start to roll. What we have in the end is a totally reformatted cinematic experience, more similar to the kind presented by TV than to the one that’s a proper requirement for cinema. For the cinephile, it’s truly heartbreaking.
Of course, the Hollywood monster is the first and exemplary model of this kind of mechanisms, and yet, despite its sins, its quantity and variety in every field have always somewhat made up for that. One would expect a different approach from a relatively little European country that still takes pride in its independence in other cultural areas.
As an ex-projectionist and as an ocassional visitor to Iceland and two or three of it’s cinemas there are two things that spring to my mind:
– When I was in Iceland I heard that it’s movie theatres are mostly used for starting test balloons: Iceland is often the first european country american films are on display. The companies who distribute the movie want to see how an european audience reacts to commercials (both for and just before the movies), how they like the movie, how many of them go there etc. So Iceland is a cinematographic research project and on the basis of this project the companies decide how many copies of a movie they let circulate in the rest of Europe and how they can optimize the distribution and the advertisement. As small arthouse movies often don’t travel to Iceland (as their distributors often can’t afford a test balloon) the audience doesn’t often experience them in cinema.
So, what does one expect of the icelandic movie audience? Of course their culture of watching a movie is formed by this very commercial background of the film industrie.
– Which brings me to the next point: cinema is often, maybe always, industrie. I’m not only talking about Hollywood but about estimated more or less 99% of movies. Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier, Claude Chabrol etc. are not only great directors but they are also great partners in crime with the producers. Those give money for movies and often not for the sake of the pictures or the story but for making a profit with the movies. I’m not against profits at all (well, of course I am, as long as it’s the others who make profits and not me 😉 but to watch movies in a cinema is IMO just the counterpart to going to work in a factory: While you work in the latter to produce a surplus, you relax in the former to consume the surplus you made.
I absolutely understand your frustration. Me as an ex-projectionist and movie lover am totally pissed to see five people on a friday night watch “El ultima aplauso” a great movie about a tango bar in buenos aires and to see 500 watch Harry Potter. But movies are products. Big movies are mass-products and the small movies are for the elite.
Thanks for your very interesting comment and for the insight on the subject at hand. Thanks to it I’ve got to know more on the subject.
I know all movies are in the end a product of industry and that art movies are in most cases not completely innocent. A movie after all is a product that requires a lot of effort also in financial terms, so one can’t really expect a director to be 100% free when filming. But it’s also true that some directors, not only those working for smaller or lower budget productions, have a way to have things done according to their own professional policy. Hollywood has a history full of commercial directors that were also masters in this respect. All the Hitchcocks, the Howard Hawkses, the William Wylers, the John Fords, and so on… Classic Hollywood is full of figures like them, you don’t have to look for Chabrols or Godards – who anyway admitted to have admired those directors themselves. Hollywood directors like them were involved in directing movies produced for the masses with consistent amounts of money, with big names to star in them and lots of funds invested for promotion; but even if they remained inside the industry’s limits they kept their works in their hands. They knew how to bend the industry’s limits without compromising themselves.
Hollywood and big productions aren’t necessarily synonymous of bad cinema, as art film isn’t necessarily synonymous of quality. Many art films are quite bad and pretentious and their directors in the best cases don’t have a clue, or in the worst are very insincere. One shouldn’t really have the two categories separated in a drastic way. Even watching a big production one can still be free to keep a certain degree of awareness. The problem that stupidly concerns me is the fact the public in many cases isn’t educated to awareness. The audience likes to be fooled in both cases, both if it it’s an elite or if it’s not. And the lack of respect implied isn’t really justified, I think.
And the lack of respect implied isn’t really justified, I think. – Agreed.
The problem that stupidly concerns me is the fact the public in many cases isn’t educated to awareness. –
Interesting point as it directs me to the question how and why the public is not educated to awareness and how awareness towards a certain culture of watching movies could be trained.
Thorstein Veblen would say it’s a question of being rich or poor with the rich being able to watch even boring movies in a very cultured manner and I think Pierre Bourdieu would say that people with a lot of cultural capital develop a certain habitus towards culture, which show how they respect culture.
The movie goers of Iceland wich imo belong to one of the richest and culturally most educated people world wide seem to prove how both of them are wrong.
I’m sure I’m not qualified to try to answer your questions, but I’ll say anyway what I think myself.
Regarding the why people are not aware I think it’s quite simply because they are, after all, consumers; the evil corporate side of the industry finds it more convenient to deal with an audience that is not fully aware of what you’re trying to sell them. As many people are not aware of what, how and why they buy when entering a supermarket, many are not when they go to a cinema theater to watch a movie. A herd that follows the paths indicated I suppose is what the big companies find easier to manage. The industry has established a formula and it wouldn’t be as profitable for them to have the audience going astray and having to start over all the times, as it wouldn’t be profitable to have a too fragmented audience in terms of tastes and procedures of consumption, as it would mean developing fragmented strategies, with a waste of time and resources on their part.
As for the how I agree that maybe developing a cultural capital would be of some use. But cultural capital can be developed not only by an elite or inside the boundaries of specialized institutions. If you start in the early stages of the individual development to teach, for example in schools or in similar places, that a film is not only pure entertainment and an end in itself, but that it is a text as a book that can be read on several different levels, and if you educate people from the start that like other texts a film has a social and historical value that can be understood only watching it with the right amount of attention, maybe that would be a good starting point. And maybe in later stages of a person’s life the habit of watching a film would be taken into account differently as it would suggest all sorts of different mental associations.
Maybe even in Iceland, where people are so much more educated than in many other countries, this kind of direction has still to be taken into cosideration. And as I see it – but that’s another story – for at least some videogames that are a form of medium bodering for many aspects with cinema, it should be the same.