Everything That’s Wrong With ‘Event Cinema’

If you believe what you read in The Guardian, the traditional cinematic experience is dying. Odeons across the country are gathering dust, people are downloading the latest releases illegally from The Twitter rather than paying for cinema tickets and the $400,000,000 that Inception has made in three weeks at the global box office is merely the result of an elaborate money laundering operation set up by Christopher Nolan to up his street cred.

As a result, film exhibitors are looking for new ways to entice audiences to pay for films, and it seems the promise of a life-threateningly hilarious Orange Wednesdays advert is no longer cutting it.

More and more events are popping up (especially in London) promising a ‘new spin’ on cinemagoing. Often this new spin consists of a change of location, because obviously what people are really bored of about traditional cinemas is not the inflated prices, rude staff and endless adverts, but the really fucking annoying things like the comfort, convenience and quality of seeing a film in a building designed to show films.

Hence anyone who wanted to see Spike Jonze’s short film I’m Here when it screened in London earlier this year had to traipse off to an oh-so-exclusive screening in a damp NCP car park in Soho (how gritty!) while the premiere of the surprisingly-amazing Banksy doc Exit Through The Gift Shop took place in a tunnel near Waterloo (cos dat is werr ppl do grafiti yeh?). Both probably made for a few great Twitpics but I don’t imagine either provided the ideal atmosphere to watch a film in.

Personally, I saw Exit Through The Gift Shop on a Monday morning at the Curzon Soho. The seats were comfortable, there was air conditioning, and the soundtrack didn’t sound like it was being amplified through a chain of megaphones. Maybe you had a great time at the tunnel, and feel free to comment if you did, but I’d wager that the cinema wins out.

These one-off events are bad enough, but at least the majority of critics aren’t desperately writing them up as the future of the world and everything in it. For that kind of hysteria look to Secret Cinema: an organisation that exists partly to plan monthly cinema events and partly to give Time Out journalists something to masterbate over.

When it began, Secret Cinema wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The concept - a monthly screening of an unannounced film in an unusual location - was a relatively novel one and although screening conditions weren’t necessarily optimum, they at least put the effort in with all the extra crap: a pop-up skate park for Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a staff made up entirely of astronauts for Alien, etc. etc. etc.

Innocuous enough, right? WRONG. For their Bugsy Malone screening, held at East London’s Troxy ballroom, the big surprise was a massive custard pie fight, to be synchronised with the one that features at the end of the film. Apart from the fact that the smell must have been unbearable about ten minutes later, my real problem with this is that it sets a dangerous precedent: the willingness of the organisers to ‘pause’ the film, or at least distract an audience’s attention from it, half-way through. OK, Bugsy Malone isn’t the most ‘worthy’ film ever made, but who knew what might be the next film interrupted by Secret Cinema?

As it turned out, it was Blade Runner and I was there. Like the previous events I’d read so much about, the design and activities were pretty good: they’d built a massive futuristic Chinatown in the Canary Wharf warehouse where the screening was to take place and we were invited to hold snakes, explore the ‘strip club’ and, of course, buy some waaaay overpriced beer.

But such pleasures were soon a fleeting memory when the film started up. The dialogue was almost inaudible as it echoed around the massive room, and the seats were so cheap and rigid that a half-hour episode of The Simpsons would have been difficult to endure, let alone a two-hour sci-fi epic. The final injustice came towards the end of the film as two actors, suspended on wires and lit by two massive spotlights, mimicked the actions of Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer’s characters during the iconic ‘Tears in Rain’ speech. The film was ignored, the mood was destroyed and above all, the message was clear: Blade Runner on its own is no longer good enough - it needs a few cunts on strings to make it entertaining.

After I reviewed the night for my blog, a PR agent told me that I was the only person to give it a negative write-up. Total Film called it a ‘roaring success’, The Guardian said it was ‘truly innovative’ and cited the ‘exciting moment’ when the film was interrupted, even the normally stoic Sight & Sound this month published an article describing Secret Cinema as an ‘excellent way of engaging viewer interest’. An upcoming screening of my favourite film Blue Velvet looks set to be just as popular, but who knows what kooky shit they’ll unleash on the audience when they decide the film’s getting a bit boring…  Am I taking the whole thing too seriously? Maybe, but I don’t think I’m alone.

Thankfully, a small proportion of ‘event cinema’ organisers are avoiding the stunts-and-gimmicks approach and instead focusing on creating events in which the film is central to the audience’s enjoyment, rather than supplementary. Film4′s Summer Screen series at Somerset House (currently ongoing) takes the familiar unorthodox-setting route, in this case Somerset House’s large outdoor courtyard, but ensures that projection quality and audio clarity are always at an impressively high standard. The 2000-strong audience are enthusiastic but respectful, and the programming choices are refreshingly daring (they’re doing Mulholland Drive this Friday).

I saw a double bill of Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Enter The Dragon there last Friday and the audience were transfixed. As the gunshot rang out announcing ‘The 4th Film from Quentin Tarantino’ and Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) effortlessly filled the massive courtyard, there was no Nancy Sinatra impersonator in front of the screen, no team of acrobats running around the audience, just 2000 people starring at a movie under the night sky.

It might just tempt the teens away from BitTorrent.

P.S. While we’re on the subject, I might as well do a bit of shameless promotion for my own form of ‘event cinema’: the monthly Ultra Culture Cinema at the ICA in Central London. We do plenty of quirky shit before and after the film but hopefully nothing than distracts from the amazingness of sitting down and watching a film with 200 totally awesome like-minded individuals. A few tickets are still available for our Scott Pilgrim night on August 25th. Hope to see you there.