Page 20 - CR31R.pdf

The Cinema at the Cinema

By Roger Seccombe

ommentators and historians of the cinema have often decades the cinema around the world remained studio-based.
remarked, with surprise, that the cinema rarely ven- If you wanted to film in a cinema, you reproduced it in the stu-
Ctured inside the cinema as a setting for films. Even dio — often with a very obvious lack of realism! Take the
with the most expanded list, including films with only mini- British attempt at H G Wells’ Things to Come (1936). The
mal visual references to cinemas, the number is quite minis- extraordinary recreation of an Art Deco cinema in Everytown,
cule compared with the hundreds of thousands of films pro- bombed in the air raids, is definitely the product of an over-
duced over the past one hundred years. Putting aside, initially,
possible artistic or aesthetic reasons why film makers might
object to the cinema as a film set, there are two significant
technical obstacles to filming in a cinema. The first is the
Studio System, the second, the problems of coping with light-
ing and synchronising the filmed image.
For much of the history of the cinema, the prevailing trend
has been to film under controlled conditions in the studio.
When equipment was more primitive and filmstocks less sen-
sitive, it made sense to film in the constant and reliable world
of the film studio where lighting and weather could be dictat-
ed by the lighting director. The early film makers migrated
from the vagaries of the east coast of the United States to the
Mediterranean mecca of Hollywood. Yet even here much of
the earlier film production was studio-bound. Later, with the
coming of sound, there was even more reason to cope with the
deficiencies of early recording equipment by filming indoors, In the bio box of the Cinema Paradiso.
away from the problems of background noise and wind. For
heated art director’s imagination! Also from the same year,
Hitchcock’s studio recreation of the Bijou fleapit cinema in
Sabotage may look acceptable in the interior (despite an audi-
ence apparently watching a show with the house lights on!)
but the over-elaborate facade (a mini Colosseum?) doesn’t
convince as anything other than a film set.

Buster Keaton on the screen in Sherlock Jnr.

Unconvincing studio cinemas occur in even relatively
modern films. In Singin’ in the Rain, when the film-within-
the-film finishes and Lena mimes the title song, the main cur-
tain (previously motorised) is manually pulled back to reveal
an empty backstage. There’s no evidence of a screen, screen
masking or anything! All has vanished! Yes, phony studio-
recreated cinemas appear in many films. The budding train
robber in The Grey Fox (1982) gets the idea for robbing trains

Left: “The Bijou” mock up on the backlot for Sabotage.

20 Autumn 2001 CINEMARECORD