Sin in the Cinema

Extract

To begin, we need to say something in general about the cinema as a medium. To do this, let’s throw away the packaging, the ice cream, the popcorn, the advertisements. We are not dealing with television, so there are to be no advertising breaks within the film, no welcome or unwelcome intrusions from other people; we pay our money, settle in our place, the lights are lowered. We can’t escape, it is us and the film. We are in the dark or semi-dark, but around us there are others, an anonymous collectivity drawn together in the watching of a film. Film makes its appeal to a mass audience, so we laugh, we weep, we are scared, or we are just bored, with others. Afterwards we can talk about the experience, agree or disagree with the critics. Yet besides all this shared experience, those images on the screen can stir personal memories, stimulates desires, bring up from the subconscious dreams and fantasies, we can identify with the characters and with the situations. It is a way to escape from our everyday life. Like Wittgenstein, we can sit in the front row of the stalls and let the film take over, cleanse and purify us like a shower bath. It is a way in which we can indulge ourselves, let our imagination have free scope. Pope Pius XII in two allocutions in 1955, to the Italian Film Industry (June 21) and to the Congress of the International Union of Theatre Owners and Film Distributors (October 28) was eloquent about this power of the cinema to transfer the spectator to an imaginary world and so produce an effect of emancipation and liberation. Another Italian put it rather differently. Federico Fellini in his film The City of Women, recalling his visits to the cinema in his youth, shows us a row of schoolboys in the stalls who become a host of individuals in one vast bed, each fantasizing and masturbating.