In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema by Gabriele Pedulla (review)

A versatile writer and scholar whose work includes studies of Machiavelli, contemporary Italian literature, and a prize-winning collection of short stories, Gabriele Pedulla turns his attention in this book to one of his longstanding passions, the cinema. Masterfully translated by Patricia Gaborik, a scholar of Italian theater, the volume takes as its point of departure the purported closing of the “age of cinema,” but includes discussions of early cinema, relations between theater and cinema, the role of theater architecture, as well as the transformation of the aesthetics of viewing in the digital age. Because of this wide range of topics, the book’s title is somewhat misleading.

An opening quotation from René Barjavel’s Cinéma total—”one mustn’t regret”—perhaps announces the author’s temptation to regret the passing of cinema’s golden years. For Pedulla, the “age of cinema” lasted from the 1920s into the 1970s, coinciding with modernism in art and architecture. Arguing that the role of the architecture of movie theaters (called “cinemas” in most European languages) has been neglected in film criticism, Pedulla contends that the flourishing of what he calls the “dark cube” corresponded with that of the “white cube,” the modernist art gallery. Both spaces tend to capture and control the gaze of the spectator, removing distractions and creating what Benjamin called an “aura” around the work of art. Whereas most critics have emphasized the aesthetic differences between theater and cinema, Pedulla, comparing the “dark cube” to the “Vitruvian theater,” points out their similarities. The movie theater, although it developed its own peculiar features, grew out of the Italian Renaissance theater and the nineteenth-century Parisian boulevard theater. All of these encouraged the immobility and silence of spectators engaged in a communal experience and separated from their daily lives. Although they may form strong emotional identifications with the characters on stage or screen, they understand the separation between that space and the auditorium. Thus, in the famous example discussed by Stanley Cavell, no spectator can save Desdemona from being strangled by Othello.

The strict code of viewing during cinema’s golden age fostered the art of directors such as Hitchcock, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, and Godard—a cinema for which many of us feel nostalgic. But movies were not always shown in a “dark cube.” Viewing in the 1910s and early twenties took place in “promiscuous environments” such as the Winter Garden in Antwerp, where concerts, cafés, vaudeville acts and other activities coincided with incidental film showings. In such places there was neither darkness, nor quiet, nor immobility, nor separation from the outside world. Avant-garde writers and directors for the theater such as the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti also used film in conjunction with other types of performance. Pedulla compares this early cinema to medieval theatrical performances, which also took place outdoors, in daylight, and in various places, before the creation of the Italian playhouse.

This analysis of early cinema leads Pedulla to a new insight on Walter Benjamin’s much-discussed essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” which contains not only his theory of the “loss of aura” in mechanically reproduced art but also his crediting cinema with creating “reception in a state of distraction” among spectators, an idea that he would follow up in his essays on Brecht. Although Benjamin wrote the essay in 1935–1936, Pedulla contends that he had in mind not the full-length feature films of the 1930s but the short sketches of the 1910s and 1920s, a type of cinema he nostalgically evokes elsewhere. The narrative cinema, closer to theater, destroyed this state of distraction. In a further twist in theater-cinema relations, avant-garde theater in the early twentieth century declared war on the bourgeois public and its playhouses, allowing the cinema to capture them.

“Reception in a state of distraction” could also be applied to the viewing styles of the post-cinema era, the...