REGLAS DE VUELO Y OPERACIÓN GENERAL SUBPARTE B - REGLAS GENERALES DE VUELO

The few descriptions cited above are enough to suggest that the atmosphere of the cinema auditorium was unique among the range of visual public entertainments existing at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not, therefore, just the films that came into the focus of film reception; the milieu also played a part. Memoirists, who give us scrupulous and lively descripttions of the interior of cinema auditoria, telling us how the performances took place and how the audience behaved, do not, as a rule, remember the films themselves. This is not simply because the films were always changing, while the space they were being shown in stayed the same. It is also because at that time people who went to the cinema looked around them more keenly than they do today. Early patrons were fascinated not by films alone but rather by films and the environment, which, taken together, contributed to the as yet undifferentiated, overall impression of ‘cinema’. Let us look now at two details that went to make up this impression: the illumination and the temperature of the auditorium.

In the early 1900s the source of light used in cinema projectors was not electricity but mainly ether- oxygen burners, or ‘saturators’. For the cinemagoer of those years the spluttering of the lamps, the flickering, yellowish, unsteady beam of the projector, the faint but exciting smell of the ether were essential attributes of the show.7 _{Another feature of ether-oxygen projectors (apart from the improved Lawson}

burners)8 _{was that they overheated very quickly, and when this happened the temperature in the auditorium}

rose significantly. One Moscow cinema was even named ‘The Hot Box’ [Goryachaya budka], and no doubt the large Volcano cinema on Taganskaya Square held more than merely exotic associations for Muscovites. The situation looked all the more unreal since the audience were not supposed to take off their coats, although etiquette—quickly dictated by pressure from the rear rows—required the removal of headgear. At the beginning of the century it was not done to remain in a public place with one’s coat on: this was allowed only in church. In winter (the season of cinema) some people dropped into the cinema just to get warm. The newspaper satirist Lolo [Munshtein] published a eulogy in verse to cinema, which had the following lines: ‘We went to the pictures. My girlfriend whispered: “It’s as lovely and warm as a Turkish bath!”’9 _{And a}

casual passer-by, strolling on the streets of Vasilevsky Island in St Petersburg, could easily recognise a cinema from a distance: ‘Chattering sparrows on telephone wires/Clouds of steam from the cinema doors…’10

However, the dominant feature, which immediately determined the nature of cinema reception in early twentieth-century culture, was the darkened auditorium. Although complete or partial darkness was familiar from magic lantern shows and some theatre performances, it was in cinema that it acquired the character of a dominant cultural symbol (in the Tadzhik language the first word for cinema was, in fact, the word for darkness, ‘torikiston’).11 _{For a newcomer to cinema, the darkness of the auditorium, coupled with the}

silence of the characters on the screen and the black-and-white quality of the image, might stir an association with the depths of the ocean or a subterranean world. Several passages from Russian film literature could be cited to illustrate this point, but the best example can be found in an essay by Robert Musil: ‘Mute as a fish and pale as an underground creature the film swims in the pool of the barely visible’ [‘Stumm wie ein Fisch und bleich wie Unterirdisches schwimmt der Film im Teich des Nursichtbaren’].12 _This

metaphor provides a graphic example of the way in which an ordinary trope of film reception may grow into a (very German) phenomenological statement.

Thus, the darkness of the auditorium, which was believed to enhance the reception of the film and to make it easier for the viewer to be drawn into the world of the image, itself became an object of reception. In a way, this was a repetition of an effect experienced some twenty years earlier by European theatre audiences under the impact of Wagner’s music dramas. As Richard Sieburth writes:

Unlike the French theatres, which traditionally kept the houselights on during the entire performance (thus effectively maintaining the audience itself as part of the spectacle), Bayreuth plunged its public into a community of shared darkness. With all attention reverently directed at the illuminated stage, the entire aesthetic experience of drama thus took on the mystical quality of a religious event—the theatre as temple, the audience as anonymous of ficiants at a redemptive rite.13

In a similar manner, the sight of half-illuminated faces silently concentrated on the rectangle of light evoked images of occult circles, in particular the rituals of secret sects, which Andrei Bely’s novel The Silver Dove had done so much to bring to the interest of the public. In 1910 Maximilian Voloshin wrote about cinema: ‘In a small room with bare walls, reminding one of the prayer rooms of the flagellants, an ancient, ecstatic, purifying rite is enacted.’14

When in 1902 the well-known newspaper reporter N.G.Shebuyev visited the all-night shelter for vagrants at the Khitrov market in Moscow, he was not slow to compare it with the cinema:

I held up a candle and illuminated the faces of my informants. It flickered over tramps and down-and- outs. Faces shone for a few moments in the light of the candle and then disappeared in the semi-gloom. It was living cinema.15

Shebuyev’s comparison owes much to the stubborn reputation of cinema as the nadir, the underworld, the catacomb of culture. This motif was a variation on a theme that was central to film reception in Russia: cinema as a world beyond the grave. In the Introduction I have discussed the way in which early film reception contributed to Symbolist sensibility and how cinema became part of the mythology of St Petersburg. Later on these themes will be treated more fully in the passages describing certain features of Andrei Bely’s script for a film based on his novel Petersburg.16 _{Here it should be noted that ‘beyond the}

grave’ did not refer exclusively to what was happening on the screen. Reception works by diffusion rather than distinction: it blurs all boundaries. At times the entire edifice of the film theatre, and not just the auditorium, would be described as the house of the dead.

Here is an example. By coincidence, 1907—the year the revolution of 1905 was finally crushed—was also the year of the big cinema-building boom in Russia. In the gloom of the moral depression that hung over the whole nation these new buildings looked like ominous fungi on the dead bodies of the cities. In an article of that year Alexander Koiransky, writing in emigration, described the scene:

they [cinemas] grew like mushrooms at a time when one had to distract oneself at any cost, when nerves shattered by the upheavals of the revolution were unable to stand theatre or concerts…. And they still have a forbidding air about them: tense (but not happy) faces in the strange, deathly light of the electric lamps; the gloomy auditorium; the sepulchral voices of the gramophones.17

Thirty years later, in the age of sound, the idea of cinema as an evocation of eternal night appeared again in Boris Poplavsky’s novel Home from the Clouds, which describes the aimless wanderings of another émigré, this time a fugitive from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917:

I am free. I am completely free to turn right or left; to stay in the same place; to smoke; to go home and go to bed in the middle of the day; to go to the pictures in the daytime, and thereby to pass in an instant from day into night, into the subterranean realm of speaking shadows.18