It’s barely noteworthy to say that cinephilia has changed drastically because of the internet. There’s more access than ever, and the ratio of images seen through screens rather than projected and bounced back in black rooms is more than ever. Cinema, as a cultural phenomenon, had declined for decades, leading to the “3 movies a year” crowd and culminating in Covid all but killing casual interactions with the movie theater. Everything’s an event now, and AMC plays half an hour of trailers before they show it to you. Blockbusters have to have an essence of “the biggest movie ever” since Endgame, and mid-budgets feel like they exist to whip up a couple weeks of quick discourse online to get younger viewers into the theater so that they can feel relevant. This is probably an unfixable problem, or at least a futile one—any attempt to fix it would exacerbate the functional issue that the medium has created in its wake, in that films now act as if they have to be important to try to get people to see them.
People that still watch films religiously know there’s something important to them—or, at least, that is what we have to tell ourselves. This is a broad feeling, not one that necessarily has to manifest in each work, in each viewing. I’d argue that seemingly minor experiences with the medium can be just as important. One who watches cinema frequently is bound to have many profound moments with it, but even the smaller, more casual and forgettable watches still function to draw the viewer out of routine mental state.
I was talking with a co-worker recently who said there’s certain movies they only watch in the theater because it’s a place of discipline. That’s not to say that nothing there can take your attention away from the screen—like the problem of chatter in the theater—but within the dark walls flanking a shining movie screen, one gets the chance to let everything outside fade away.
Another thing I’m guilty of is checking my phone while watching a movie on the TV or laptop. It’s easy to reach for something else in the lulls, and perhaps a sign of addiction when I do it while watching something I’m enjoying. Yet it's a tic that never takes hold when I’m in a theater—it would be sacrilegious. The overwhelming space of a movie theater creates a physical space to live within the time-space of the film itself. A film, then, doesn’t need to project a self-seriousness in a movie theater (even though this is often what marketers reach for to get people there) given that just by sitting in the theater the film already gets to subsume everything around you and become your life.
As a time-based medium, film has the ability to convey information and provide space to process it. I was thinking about this recently after interviewing a filmmaker whose essay films work not just as a delivery method for a specific thread of knowledge, but as a time and place for the viewer to unpack and organize it for themselves. In this sense, cinema can function simultaneously as text, teacher, and classroom—or, more poetically, as scripture, preacher, and church.
This isn’t necessarily what the medium is on a basic level, though, as even though much of the medium’s history has been built around the silver screen, it’s increasingly decoupled itself from that place as the years have gone on, whether by way of television, home video, streaming, or clips meant to play on fleeting social media feeds. It’s a safe bet to say that the vast majority of movie-watching now isn’t in the space of a cinema, and it brings up the question of whether we’re watching the “real” thing on a computer screen, the same way one has to wonder if watching a network show at any time you want with no ad breaks dilutes the experience. Maybe I’ve never really seen so many of my favorite masterpieces because I watched them lying in bed rather than on a 35mm print surrounded by dozens of people looking at the same light as me. What I do know is that sitting in a theater can transform a film I thought I once knew.
This summer, I saw The Thin Red Line in theaters for the first time. It was a favorite of mine in high school, and I since grew ambivalent towards it, both as a fledgling step towards Terrence Malick’s more mature works and because of its aggressive cavalcade of actors. It became hard to stay engaged on rewatch, where the immediacy of Malick’s filmmaking was disrupted by just how many recognizable faces pop on and off screen, how quickly they come and how quickly they go.
Watching on the big screen, between the dark walls of the theater, this experience completely changed. Suddenly the cavalcade wasn’t a funny moment remembering “he’s here too,” and instead became a shorthand—the big movie star faces gave big movie star emotions. Most of the men on screen weren’t particularly famous at the time. Jim Caviezel, John C. Reilly, Elias Koteas, Tim Blake Nelson, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack, Jared Leto, Woody Harrelson, George Clooney, Adrien Brody—none were a particular box office draw except maybe Sean Penn, or people heading towards a wash-up like Nick Nolte and John Travolta. But on the big screen it’s so obvious why they’re in Hollywood, why their faces are 20 feet tall—they’re not just recognizable as movie stars, but they’re movie stars because they are recognizable, because they can deliver so much with their eyes in a split second so that the movie can keep going. On a small screen they’re just faces too perfect to fit into our real lives, they’re something fictive, unbelievable. But in the cinema they form a new kind of world we step into, one that’s already bigger than ourselves and we can only visit in that dark room.