Law of the lounge

At the first squelch, I knew the film would be ruined. Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen her unwrap the gum, pop the wad in her mouth and masticate it experimentally. But worse was to come. The stranger sitting next to me, at the screening of the meticulously restored print of the 1970s kung-fu classic, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, was a talker. And, lo and behold, five minutes into the feature came the first inane comment (‘Look at his shoes!”) of a whole swarm she would emit over the next 120 minutes.

Talking during films — and chewing, texting, tapping — has made cinema-going such a tense experience for me that I now mainly avoid it. I have tried glaring and have even gone on to saying ‘shush” — but with barely increased effect.

One co-sufferer has perfected a manoeuvre that itself has something of the martial arts about it: without warning, pivoting his elbow on the armrest shared with the offending neighbour, he will reach down in one swift, swinging movement and pinch his or her knee. Apparently the surprise is often enough to induce an adequate temporary dumbness. The protagonist in the Julian Barnes short story, Vigilance, from his new collection, goes further still — much further — tripping an unapologetic concert interrupter (a different, but related case) down the stairs.

It is tempting to invoke some bygone, halcyon era of cinematic serenity, but it would be illusory. The silent era was anything but. Many audience members were illiterate and had the inter-titles (the expository snatches of script interspersing the action) read out to them. ‘You’d have this chorus going on of people reciting the lines as they came up between the scenes,” says Jeffrey Richards, author of Age of the Dream Palace.

Nor did the talkies bring quiet. Film theatres ran ‘continuous performances”, the programme screened in a loop. There would often be a newsreel, then a short, followed by one or two features. The audience came and went throughout; people queued not for individual sessions but for places to become free. With ushers (that endangered species) showing them to their seats, organ recitals and the occasional singalong, cinemas were not always places of reverent hush.

In Britain, how quiet they were depended to a strong extent on class. Like music halls, their direct precursor, cinemas could be rowdy in working-class parts, but the rowdiness was collective and ritualised. You would not have attended if you were not likely to join in.

Richards cites a contemporary report of an audience booing the 20-minute classical concert scene in Lothar Mendes’s 1937 film Moonlight Sonata, which they found over-long.

Middle-class cinemas, by contrast, were far more buttoned up. It was this profitable respectability to which the cinema industry increasingly aspired as it moved away from its vaudeville antecedents.

A friend’s mother recalls a screening at the Hampstead Everyman during World War II. She had gone with a chum in the women’s auxiliary air force; they hadn’t seen each other for ages and had a lot of catching up to do — which they did, during the film. The man sitting behind them leaned over and said: ‘Do you mind speaking up a bit? I can’t hear what you’re saying.” The sarcasm must have stained the seats.

Cinema mores are also a matter of ‘when in Rome”. Or Harlem: screenings in black neighbourhoods in the United States can be a little like charismatic church services, with whooping and hollering punctuating the celluloid action.

William Ickes, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Arlington, says: ‘The norm is to talk during the film, as a way of expressing one’s emotional involvement with the events on the screen.”

I have sometimes called upon psychology to explain cinema talkers — they talk (and twitch and so on) every few minutes to prove they still exist. Another theory is that film, especially Hollywood pap, infantilises its audience and that the babbling, crisp-crunching and Coca-Cola-slurping, along with the consumption of the feature product itself, is typical of the instant gratification of a two-year-old.

But there is also a political dimension: today’s talkers, of all generations, classes and colours, are products of the Anglo-American 1980s, when the idol of selfish individualism began its battle for supremacy. And the technological aspect: the first video players in 1975 heralded the eventual decline of the distinction between watching a film at the cinema and anywhere else. Now that video competes with cable, pay-per-view, satellite and DVD, not to mention terrestrial TV, more films are being watched than ever before — but, overwhelmingly, on the small screen.

The specialness of the cinema — and its concomitant rules, including silence, and rituals, such as dressing-up — has gone. The law of the lounge has taken its place.

‘Today,” says Bruce Austin, author of Immediate Seating: A Look at Cinema Audiences, ‘the talking, the eating, the carting of infants and so forth … is all a part of the theatrical movie experience. And it’s all stuff that people have dragged with them from home (in front of the TV) and into the movie theatre.”

For me, the film house reached its apogee in the form of the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque, run by the Lithuanian exile Jonas Mekas in 1960s and 1970s New York. A sign in the foyer described the cinema’s strict enforcement, on pain of eviction, of silence. Jan Wilson describes the experience: ‘It was unlike going to any other theatre. It was quite eerie; there was dead silence and complete blackness … The seats were black velvet, comfortable … each was a sort of cubicle. They were partitioned from one another so that the only space was in front of one.”

The only establishment in the United Kingdom that comes close is the National Film Theatre in London — but that is where my talker was.

My fantasy is to found a theatre like the Cinémathèque. I hope it would find an audience but the latest developments do not bode well. The image and sound quality of ‘home cinemas” continues to improve.

They can only become more widespread, further eroding any distinction the cinema retains. —