A scene from "L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" Did you ever pick your feet up from the floor of a movie theater? I did it a lot as a child (still do sometimes), and not because of sticky Coke syrup. Taking my feet off the floor while watching a movie is a way of making myself feel safe. I’m pretty sure I tucked my sneakers under me in an attempt to escape Disney’s giant squid (in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954). Covering my eyes was another protective magic; I think I did both these things during Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956). When that giant saucer sliced through the Washington Monument and, with people everywhere on the run, headed for the Capitol Building, I just couldn’t look. It all seems so tame now, with real life way scarier, but back then, for a middle-class eight-year-old struggling with the idea of the Neutron Bomb, the decimation of the revered (and extremely phallic) national monument and its partner the Capitol, a benign breast-like (Do I go too far?) dome were tantamount to double murder. Movies were just too real.
The Wicked Witch of the West was consummate evil; her melting, in The Wizard of Oz, should have given me some comfort, but I couldn’t watch that happen any more than I could look on Ahab’s corpse tied to the Whale in Moby Dick. These cinematic traumas happened in the movie palaces and domed stadium theaters of my Cincinnati childhood. Movies that contain horror moments are, like roller coasters, more attractive than repulsive, and the theaters that contained these movies involved another deeper level of fantasy, which is why, eventually, I was drawn to the project of running a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, where I’d come to live by 1976. The St. George had its horror moments too.
I was grown up by then, but when Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) came on-screen in our magic cave of a palace, my feet went off the floor. I didn’t watch all of this movie, partly because I needed to spend time sitting in my office trying to figure out how to balance the books, and come up with the staggering sum necessary to get our hands on the next picture. But who am I fooling? When he hangs the girl on the meathook, I’m up the aisle and out of there.
The Exorcist, which I’d seen for the first time two years before, was just as scary, requiring me both to cover my eyes and tuck my feet under me. I didn’t stay for the whole movie, but couldn’t claim it was because we were running out of cash. We actually sold out! For several nights the house was packed with maniacs all hiding their eyes. Were they picking their feet up? Whether or not that’s just my peculiar reaction, it would have been a smart strategy, in a theater where spilled soda and popcorn fed an ample population of mice who made bold after everybody left. Speaking of Exorcist, when my Yoga instructor encourages me, as she did last week, to turn my neck just a little further and look backwards, I think of Linda Blair. But my feet are firmly on the floor, I’m happy to say.
There were other movies in our theater year I didn’t bother to sit down for. The Omen? I stood in the doorway with a small popcorn, and Jaws? I watched it from the concession stand, ducking my head into the popcorn popper to shut out the screams of the swimmer.
Movies, I believe, were and still are, the core of what we now call “virtual reality.” We’re used to movies, but they’re still, as they always were, collective dreams. I’d like to let Fellini weigh in on this subject:
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
"A language made of image." I like that. When I hide from the image by shielding my eyes, literally from the light, or lift my feet up, I’m responding with my whole body to the experience of dreaming.
BTW, speaking of virtual reality, there are “VR” movies (a redundancy? subject of another post?).
Long before I was around — in 1895, when cinema was in its infancy — legend has it that the Lumiere brothers presented a fifty-second short film (L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat) of a train moving towards the camera as it arrives in a station, which caused the as-yet-ignorant-of-cinema audience to bolt from the theater in panic. The story of the audience’s reaction is apparently a fiction, but what does it matter? What does it say of our own sense of wonder at watching together in the dark, that we like to think they ran away?
The Wicked Witch of the West was consummate evil; her melting, in The Wizard of Oz, should have given me some comfort, but I couldn’t watch that happen any more than I could look on Ahab’s corpse tied to the Whale in Moby Dick. These cinematic traumas happened in the movie palaces and domed stadium theaters of my Cincinnati childhood. Movies that contain horror moments are, like roller coasters, more attractive than repulsive, and the theaters that contained these movies involved another deeper level of fantasy, which is why, eventually, I was drawn to the project of running a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, where I’d come to live by 1976. The St. George had its horror moments too.
I was grown up by then, but when Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) came on-screen in our magic cave of a palace, my feet went off the floor. I didn’t watch all of this movie, partly because I needed to spend time sitting in my office trying to figure out how to balance the books, and come up with the staggering sum necessary to get our hands on the next picture. But who am I fooling? When he hangs the girl on the meathook, I’m up the aisle and out of there.
The Exorcist, which I’d seen for the first time two years before, was just as scary, requiring me both to cover my eyes and tuck my feet under me. I didn’t stay for the whole movie, but couldn’t claim it was because we were running out of cash. We actually sold out! For several nights the house was packed with maniacs all hiding their eyes. Were they picking their feet up? Whether or not that’s just my peculiar reaction, it would have been a smart strategy, in a theater where spilled soda and popcorn fed an ample population of mice who made bold after everybody left. Speaking of Exorcist, when my Yoga instructor encourages me, as she did last week, to turn my neck just a little further and look backwards, I think of Linda Blair. But my feet are firmly on the floor, I’m happy to say.
There were other movies in our theater year I didn’t bother to sit down for. The Omen? I stood in the doorway with a small popcorn, and Jaws? I watched it from the concession stand, ducking my head into the popcorn popper to shut out the screams of the swimmer.
Movies, I believe, were and still are, the core of what we now call “virtual reality.” We’re used to movies, but they’re still, as they always were, collective dreams. I’d like to let Fellini weigh in on this subject:
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
"A language made of image." I like that. When I hide from the image by shielding my eyes, literally from the light, or lift my feet up, I’m responding with my whole body to the experience of dreaming.
BTW, speaking of virtual reality, there are “VR” movies (a redundancy? subject of another post?).
Long before I was around — in 1895, when cinema was in its infancy — legend has it that the Lumiere brothers presented a fifty-second short film (L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat) of a train moving towards the camera as it arrives in a station, which caused the as-yet-ignorant-of-cinema audience to bolt from the theater in panic. The story of the audience’s reaction is apparently a fiction, but what does it matter? What does it say of our own sense of wonder at watching together in the dark, that we like to think they ran away?
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