The shrinking screen – a memoir and elegy to cinema
How cinema shaped my mind from my earliest memories and how it has survived the fluctuations of the digital age.
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My earliest memories all seem to flicker into visibility around the age of three. One centres around a jumble sale at my old primary school before I was a pupil there. My brother snagged a red plastic machine gun from one of the stalls. It made a severe, magpie-like rattle whenever its trigger was pulled.
The other memories of my third year converge around the cinema. I remember both films and their respective scenes – Sandy and Danny huddled together at the drive-in and Superman straddling a gap between two railway tracks so that a train could pass over him without derailing and plunging into a chasm below.
These viewings took place at the Granada cinema in Slough. It boasted three screens, including one which seemed bigger than any cinema I have been in since. I looked it up online and noticed that the auditorium itself was huge while the screen itself seemed relatively poky in comparison. Perhaps it was because the only screens we knew outside of the cinema were the curved, boxy tv sets we knew at home?
The same adverts that we watched on the TV most nights seemed otherworldly and epic when blown up on the big screen. While contemporary cinema audiences tend to keep drifting in or checking their phones as the ad files play, we felt a lot more locked into it when the ad reel spun. I still remember the entire audience singing along to jingles, belting out “Cook, cook, cook, cookability, that’s the beauty of gas” in unison. This was obviously tongue in cheek rather than a chorus of devotion for our (still nationalised?) gas supplier. But it was the opposite of how we engage with the cinema ads today, possibly because every element of our experience is so neatly interwoven with the constant intrusion of advertising.
I sometimes wonder if there was something about the shift from film to digital that brought about the cultural changes. Is it the presence of larger screens at home and tiny screens in our pockets? Marshall McLuhan made a big thing in The Medium is the Massage about how television screens, in contrast to cinema screens, beam projections onto us and therefore we are the screens. This seems even more true in an age where people gaze at tiny screens after turning off their bedroom lights.
Maybe there is something else at work – how there doesn’t seem (in my experience) to be as distinct a difference between the digitally projected image on today’s cinema screens and the image that beams back from the massive OLED panels found in most living rooms. Whereas the cathode ray television would beam out a steady, bright light, the OLED screen works on a pixel-by-pixel basis – with the deep black tones being created by pixels not being activated. If anything the blacks of an OLED screen probably appear darker and deeper than the blacks of a projected image.
One contrast that has become quickly apparent in recent years has been the sudden intrusion of a phone screen in some of the seats in front of me, blaring out with all the subtlety of someone shouting “bollocks” at a church service. I am sometimes one of those prefect types who will just say “put your phone away mate”. If they are in the seat in front of me, I like to speak the injunction gently into their ear. They always comply and never look back, possibly because they might think I’m a cinema attendant or the voice of their conscience.
Phones also bring to mind the ire of directors such as David Lynch. While they just about accepted decades of pan-and-scan versions of their films playing on square television screens they could no longer bear the thought of their work being played in its native aspect ratio on a six-inch display with pings and notifications firing off at every available moment.
My own latent misanthropy led me to have a little personal breakthrough during a screening in the late 2010s at the recently closed Stratford Picturehouse. With the opening of the Vue at the new Westfield shopping centre, it felt like the Picturehouse was struggling to fill up its screens and as a result had developed a more lax approach to enforcing its policies.
Every visit during this time seemed to involve other cinemagoers using their phones or chatting at moderate volumes. I was watching with my wife after we’d dropped the kids with the in-laws and so perhaps there was a clash of values – it being a rare date at the cinema for us but a place to kill a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon for the rest of the audience. I was angry, and had already exercised my gentle whisper strategy on the phone user sat right in front of me but there was no way I could swat all of the touchscreen fireflies that flickered on and off throughout the auditorium.
And then, something happened. As angry as I was, I suddenly realised that I didn’t have to be angry at any of it and that was enough for the anger to simply drop away. I don’t think I’d ever been able to do that before – to see anger as a choice – but I was able to sit back and watch the film while all the little displays flickered on and off. And what, pray tell, was the film that might have been responsible for this epiphany?
Joker. Lol.
You might also remember that Joker was released in 2019. I have a faint memory of going to see a couple of kids films near the end of that year and then I didn’t find myself in a cinema until October 2021.
I was one of those people that doubled down during the pandemic, dousing my groceries in disinfectant long after the main conduit of transmission was shown to be airborne. I double-masked and kept my distance from others as much as I could, often butting heads with other parents who didn’t observe this during collection times at the primary school (I wish my little Joker-Zen moment of liberation carried over into the coronavirus maelstrom).
The COVID restrictions allowed me to justify many of my antisocial tendencies – to see my avoidance of social situations as sanctioned and mandated by the state. Part of this made me particularly jubilant that many films were jumping straight to premium digital releases and I could sit back and watch them with the duchess and no other unnecessary disturbances – barring the kids knocking on the wall to demand something or our neighbours losing their minds at any given moment. I didn’t want cinema to die, but I didn’t feel obliged to save it either.
Much like necessity ultimately led me to clamber back onto the top decks of packed buses, I found my way back to the cinema in 2021, watching Dune on it’s opening weekend, in a sold out auditorium.
It might be the case that the vast, open desert scenes offered a sense of space that we’d all been starved of during the intermittent lockdowns. But it was probably the contrast of our immediate situation – masked up in a packed theatre full of other masked people, all of us sharing an experience of a endless-but-barren science fiction world. Not a single phone flickered on and not a single voice raised beyond a momentary whisper. I could barely believe it.
I missed out on the post-pandemic phenomenon of Barbenheimer and probably won’t be joining the rabid Generation Alpha throngs for some Chicken Jockey anarchism. The last film I saw in the cinema, Mickey 17, was one of my top three films of the year while at the same time being in my bottom three Bong Joon Ho films.
Before embarking on a career in poetry, I wanted to make films. People often told me that a lot of my poems had a cinematic quality to them, though poems (bar the odd epic) tend to deal with moments and scenes on their own rather than string them into a sturdily structured narrative. But that was before the golden age of television really got going, with films themselves becoming multi-hour episodes within a multi-year narrative that went beyond the linear events of sequels.
At the same time, self contained one-shot films seemed to bypass the theatre and go straight to streaming where they stood the chance of being played on a home projector or a 70-inch screen but were probably squinted at on a phone during a commute. This is the kind of thing that makes the auteurs retch but, strangely enough, brings films closer to poems than they have ever been before – great works that could be caught in little snatches in fleeting moments of solitude.
Maybe cinema will eventually join poetry in the pantheon of art forms that are declared dead while at the same time being part of some permanently immanent revival? I don’t know. I can only say that, for me, film has lived on as a kind of visual vocabulary to compliment the musical vocabulary of poetry. I don’t think I’d be the same person in a world where it didn’t exist.
Thanks for reading this
So [looks about sheepishly], ya might’ve noticed that these weekly essays haven’t been very… [looks about again] … weekly.
I’ve kind of noticed it myself. I think I’m beginning to realise that writing essays is more work that it’s cracked up to be. A year ago, I managed a good run of weekly essays but that’s probably because I had so many ideas in the bank after a period of inactivity. Once I used up that supply, I was at the mercy of my own inspiration which seems very contingent on other stuff that might or might not be happening in my own life, as I’m sure is the case for everybody else.
But I really would like to get back to a weekly schedule, which might involve some shorter, informal posts in between the elaborate and overwrought essays.
Before I do that, I thought it would be fair to check with my subscribers because I don’t want to be too much of a strain on your inboxes. At the bottom of this email/post is a survey, so please let me know what you think.
The plan is to send a weekly email which might be interesting, funny, poetic (or all three) and your usual monthly essay too. You have my solemn word that I won’t bother your inbox more than once a week (or one essay a month and nowt else if the poll indicates otherwise). You can feed back in the comments about your preferences too.
Cheers
Niall