In Broad Daylight. Gabriele Pedulla

the cinematic apparatus works just as well with spectators who are not seated; movies are not solipsistic like dreams, because anyone can discuss his response with the person next to him; the public is always aware it is in a dark room (an awareness we lose while we sleep); frames are detailed, whereas dream images are often partial and incomplete . . .

      Here, too, the list could go on. Yet for our discussion the decisive point is a different one: the extreme confusion about why the movie theatre was made and why people love to see films. The analogies with the cave and the mirror become objectionable first of all because they obscure the particular nature—artistic, or even just recreational—of the cinematic experience. French symbolist Rémy de Gourmont put it well back in 1907, when the idea of the equivalence of film and dream began to spread among the first timid admirers of the new art (Sigmund Freud’s book on the interpretation of dreams, not by chance, had come out in 1900): “The public doesn’t go to the cinema to dream; they go to enjoy themselves.” It would be hard to find a more perfect formula to clear away the relics of the analogies with the cave and the mirror phase. The argument that the pleasure of going to the movies really depends on a desire to regress to infancy lacks validity, too, because in this case it would be necessary to explain how it is therefore possible that people watch films with the same satisfaction on television or on their laptop: that is to say, in radically different conditions than those which Baudry judges essential for the full unfolding of the seductive power of moving images.

      What we risk losing with such interpretations is first and foremost the aesthetic function for which the movie house was imagined. When this banal observation—that people go freely to the theatre to take pleasure from moving pictures—is accounted for, the spectator’s resemblance to Plato’s prisoner or Lacan’s infant becomes irrelevant. Let us begin with Plato. How do we ignore the fact that at the movies spectators are not deceived, but rather buy a ticket to attend a show and have a story told to them, just as when they read a novel or go to the playhouse? That we appreciate films not as an alternative to life but as a pause, an intermission, a parenthesis in our daily activities, while Plato’s men are spellbound from the start in a copy of the world which for them constitutes the only reality (“from their childhood,” as specified in the Republic)? That Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” implicit in every fiction, presupposes a kind of illusion completely different from that experienced by Plato’s men, prisoners of shadows and therefore incapable of seeing the only things that truly exist—namely, ideas?

      Not every viewing experience is the same viewing experience, just as not every deception is the same deception—especially if we participate knowingly and willingly. When we consider this simple point, very little remains of the similarities that at the beginning seemed so significant. This is all the truer because the comparison with Plato’s cave seems designed to justify a rejection of cinema for being an instrument of ideological falsification and oppression: an argument against the new medium that was made often throughout the twentieth century, from the right and from the left, by such authoritative figures as Theodor W. Adorno and Georges Duhamel.

      The original sin resides in this confusion, and the same could be said of the dream analogy. Cinema is not a machine for taking people back to their childhood through hypnosis, or at least no more than it is a process for distancing them from the direct contemplation of ideas. Just like Lacan’s children, Plato’s prisoners see something, but they do not attend a show in the same way a paying spectator does. And precisely because the Greek philosopher’s preoccupations remain strictly ontological and gnoseological (What is really real? How can I recognize it?), whereas the French psychoanalyst is interested in the process leading the child to acquire the first elements of an adult consciousness (How is the subject born?), every attempt to explain cinema through an analogy with the cave or with the mirror phase enacts an undue slippage. So, we need a new strategy, as we will begin to understand the movie theatre’s function only if we study it as an integral part of the cinematic apparatus: a special device, the equal of the camera or the projector, conceived for giving the spectator a kind of experience different from all others.

      Compared to the Platonic myth and the child’s discovery of the subject, the real workings of a movie house in action undoubtedly look less exciting. A few elements suffice: a room, not necessarily big; a white wall or a big screen to project images onto; a series of seats or armchairs (though in old-time theatres people sat on the floor or stood if there were no places left); an opening opposite the screen for light to pass through. Such simple furnishings discouraged additional investigation. And yet, in its minimalism, this structure is the result of a long process of definition led by tradespeople and architects so that the film could work, if not in the best way (as we shall see, in fact, there was not just one), at least in the way that they thought best served their interests—that is to say, to maximize the spectators’ reactions and, in so doing, sell more seats.

      The apparent simplicity of the solutions adopted for the movie house might remind us of another twentieth-century aesthetic device: the art gallery. In this case, comparison can be useful. As Brian O’Doherty has recounted, this too is a locale that seems neutral, but whose every detail has been studied in advance so as to obtain the desired effect: to favor the appreciation of the works by a viewer who is always also a potential buyer. So that this can happen—so that the art can “take on its own life”— a gallery must meet a series of extremely precise requirements or risk rapid failure. The size and shape of the spaces, color, lighting, furniture, acoustics: nothing can be left to chance. The fact that the code remains implicit does not mean that its prescriptions—its musts and must nots—are not managed extremely rigorously; on the contrary, as always, the most constricting laws are those of which we are not even aware.

      Unlike film historians, though, art historians began long ago to interrogate the conventions of the gallery device, and now we can devise a sort of elementary pentalogy for the aspiring gallery manager, from the shaded windows (to keep the outside world out) and the ceiling lights as the only illumination, to the uniform white of the walls and the parquet flooring or soft moquette (evidently to lend a sense of luxury and comfort that puts the visitor at ease, preparing her for the encounter with beauty), all the way to the imperative of keeping the spaces completely empty, except for the works of art, properly separated so that each can “breathe” (a modest desk at the entrance being the only piece of furniture allowed).

      As common and insignificant as they might seem, each of these elements makes its own contribution, at once real and symbolic, to the institution that connoisseurs call simply “the white cube.” This is the official residence of Art: a room without shadows, white, clean, and artificial—ascetic as a clinic and cold as a cenotaph to the unknown soldier. Comfortable but also a tad inhospitable (just enough to make visitors maintain the required respectful attitude), purposely conceived so that the works of art can display themselves in a sort of defensive eternity, removed from time and its vagaries.

      From the moment they cross the threshold, visitors must clearly perceive that they have entered a separate space. In the end it is precisely this separation that guarantees the gallery’s efficacy, almost as if the closed space has the power to transform the most banal object into a work of art simply because it is on display there. An aesthetic response will inevitably follow an aesthetic question: this is the first and perhaps principal lesson of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. Urinals, torn posters, shit in a box: anything can be worthy of appreciation when placed in the right context, given that the gallery itself is “art-in-potency” in its purest state.

      All of this, naturally, has its price. The gallery not only encourages the aesthetic participation of its visitors, but also, in an anxiety of purity, proclaims its own distance from the outside world, imposing pre-emptive sanctions on any attempt to break down boundaries. Protected from the effects of contact with everyday life, which goes on undisturbed, the white cube resembles a limbo where, while the eyes and the mind are always welcome, the body is barely tolerated, giving rise to a curious Cartesian paradox in which the visitor is and is not there at the same time, entirely absorbed in the contemplation of the work—the only legitimate activity in a space dedicated to this single end.

      But the picture house? At first glance, it seems a world away from the white cube. Child of the Boulevard theatre, with its chaotic and noisy public, cinema is the mass art-form of the