Pen pal
BACK TO THE CINEMA. PLEASE. Words Alessandro Rognoni
If there is a type of space that we could easily call resilient, that is the cinema.
The screen in itself, more than the architecture around it, has been a source of adaptation, capable of carrying images projected in any different format, of any different content, from any part of the globe. Cinemas somehow always survived, through dictatorships or democracies: during WWII, they became both a source of distraction and information on the ongoing conflict; after the oil crisis in the 1970s, they turned to accommodate lower-budget, independent or pornographic productions. Being it watching a film or something else related, people always wanted to do it in rooms that are vast, dark, fetid, and funky.
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They also wanted to do it in what is, ultimately, a public space. Despite having been drastically commercialized, cinema-going is an event that eventually implies the important choice of escaping our private sphere, giving ourselves to the city, and traveling to what, eventually, is a very dirty chair. “[...] the darkness of the cinema is the color of a diffused Nonetheless, many of us still cherish moviegoing eroticism, by its human as an unmissable ritual. Is it for the grandiosity condensation, absence of of it? Or is it some sort of unmissable chance to worldliness and relaxation of depart our preoccupations and engage with postures.” fiction? The magical paradox of the cinema, that - Roland Barthes: “Leaving the is how deeply we can perceive the effort of our Movie Theatre” (1984) senses while being so brutally placed in front of a flat screen, is now common knowledge. However, there could be more to the cinema than just a fun night out, as we are never too sincere when justifying our appeal to the screen, especially when dealing with our more voyeuristic, almost perverse motives. Such dishonesty might reflect our deep attraction for the framing act as a chance to see without being seen, and the lookingthrough-the-doorlock nature of being in a dark room, with a license to stare, and glare, without consequences. At the same time, while indulging our weirdest selves, at the screens we are in the company of others yet alone, in public yet in odd privacy. The excitement of such perversion is what makes us go back. We return in groups, or sometimes alone (if we are obsessed enough).
