Nostalgia for a Time When Going to the Movies Was a Pleasure We All Enjoyed
Each and every one of us possess within us memories of our experiences visiting the cinema: as a child of attending at the movies with our parents; our first foreign or independent film with a group of friends; or simply visiting our local multiplex cinema to catch the latest superhero blockbuster, or making the pilgrimage to one local film festival or another.
Pre-pandemic, going to the movies was still a popular past-time, even in an age when media consumption and “film viewing” has radically changed (think of the Netflix revolution). In North America in 2019, there were 1.3 billion cinema admissions — a not-insignificant, nor surprising figure.
In 1930, more than 65% of the population went to the movies weekly. That means for every 5 people you knew, 3 of them went to the movies weekly.
Can you even imagine that?
Eighty-five years ago, cinema-going remained astoundingly popular across the continent, reaching a peak of 1.64 billion admissions in 1946 — even though the North American population was less than half of what it is today.
Why was cinema so popular in times past?
Some of the reasons are fairly straightforward: there was limited opportunity long ago for inexpensive recreational activities outside of the home, television had yet to assert its power, and film was an established medium which exposed millions to different worlds and alluring cultures (or, more often, to the vicissitudes of North American culture).
There was, however, a deeper and perhaps more fundamental reason for movie-going’s immense popularity in North America mid-20th century.
Recent research on movie-going habits in the twenty and 21st centuries has focused on the interplay between space and emotion, and how cinemas act as facilitators of emotional experiences in ambiguous spaces.
Over the years, movies have aided people in helping to reveal new insights into their lives, while allowing a better understanding of the lived experiences of people across the globe, and in their own neighbourhood. Cinema has not only traced our conception of life, but has also served to affect our outlook on life and the lives of others.
Watching a film in the presence of others is different from watching a film alone, or with our family: the collective constellation affects the way viewers experience a film, made all the more obvious once strong emotions and affective expressions come into play: laughter, sadness, shame, anger, screaming, and more often than not (if we’re lucky) being moved to tears.
Different times in history — and different spaces — have served to create new affective landscapes and altered existing ones, making cinema a useful category for historians to study changes in society and culture over time.
The history of cinema has been integrated alongside other sociological methodologies to help form a more refined and complex picture of the past, and in consequence has offered a valuable way of introducing new insights into the establishment of popular culture, and societal development.
The darkness of the cinema environment presents the opportunity to experience a strong shared emotional experience in a public setting, in the anonymous environment of the auditorium. No other public space has facilitated this to such a degree, and this uniqueness reveals how the life of our society developed in specific contexts and in precise locations.
The enclosed and defined space of the cinema auditorium, containing a distinct group in the form of an audience, is an obvious example of community. Patrons in the cinema are aware of both their own emotional response to what they are viewing onscreen, and the feelings of those around them, providing reassurance that our emotional responses to a film are being mirrored by our fellow patrons.
Respected film critic Leslie Halliwell recalled in his memoir on cinema-going that film took “people furthest out of themselves, into a wondrous and beautiful world which became their Shangri-La”.
This utopia was reflected in the very names of cinemas — the Orion, the Rialto, the Plaza, the Regal — and in the architecture of the buildings which encompassed a range of styles including the clean lines of Art Deco and the high theatrics and excess of the “atmospherics”.
The Grandview Theatre, Commercial Drive at East 1st Avenue in Vancouver, in the 1950s
Evidence suggests that many people viewed their local movie-house, whether a stand-alone, second-run neighbourhood movie house or a first-run super-cinema, as a reassuring and familiar space characterized by a hazy emotionality fluctuating between the individual and the group, in the process offering a sense of connection with those who surrounded us.
This ambiguity — the individual vs the collective experience — lies at the heart of what attending at the cinema signifies to people. In few other areas of life are the landscapes of our lives softened to such a degree, in turn making attendance at the cinema a welcoming experience.
Cinemas have long occupied a position on the boundary between the domestic and the public, allowing our emotional experience of a movie concurrently as both communal and private, the evolving emotional landscapes which were crafted by cinema patrons in the mid-20th-century serving to break down anomie while creating a sense of connection.
The fundamentals of our affective experience at the movies has changed little over the past 100 years.
The price of popcorn, however, most definitely has.
