One day James Ferman was watching Midnight Express at a private screening. He came to the gruelling scene in which an American prisoner, driven to distraction by official brutality in a Turkish jail, lost his temper and bit off the tongue of a guard.
Sitting alone in the dark, Ferman, former director of the British Board of Film Classification, thought that this was a wonderfully powerful scene, one that was clearly intended by director Alan Parker to suggest that brutality brutalises its victim. The prisoner had become insanely violent because of his treatment in jail. There was, Ferman thought, no scope here for thinking that the prisoner was justified or heroic.
Soon afterwards, Ferman saw the film in a crowded cinema. When this scene was repeated, he was horrified to hear the audience cheer as the prisoner mutilated his oppressor. The scene had become a revenge fantasy, thanks to the reaction of the audience.
What are we to make of this? That when we see films privately we are more moral viewers than when we are exposed to them in public? That an oppressive mob psychology surfaces when violent movies are shown in the cinema? That Ferman should have cut the scene before its cinematic release?
Throughout Illuminations (Sky Premier), a stimulating documentary on how we watch film in an age of multiplexes, videos, DVDs and state-of-the-art trouser presses, the communal, even spiritual, experience of watching films in a cinema was invoked, though much more fondly than in Ferman's reminiscence. The great critic David Thomson reflected that there was once a quasi-religious dimension to cinema-going. Film, in the good old days of Thomson's fond memory, had an aura - not least because of the temple-like architecture of the great picture palaces, the dazzling chandeliers in the foyer, the clouds of cigarette smoke wafting around the screen. Cinema then was, at its best, a sacred fantasy of flickering suggestion, of mystical transubstantiation.
Once, going to the movies was an event. New films would be worshipped quickly and passionately before they fell into oblivion. Later, films became endlessly repeatable commodities, bearing out Walter Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. It is all too easy to catch up with a film, thus the viewing of a movie loses its special, auratic quality. If you miss the movie's cinematic release, it will soon be on video, and if you miss it there, it will be on a pay-per-view channel some time soon. After that it will be screened on Sky Premier, then Sky Moviemax, eventually winding up on Sky Cinema. During this period it might also become a full-on, Saturday-night multi-sponsored, ad-break-ruined horror on ITV.
Subsequently, though, the modern film becomes an artefact for the first time. It becomes so when it is slavered over by Mark Cousins on BBC2, when it joins a recherché FilmFour season and eventually when it is placed at the altar of Turner Classic Movies. In this way, the modern film will, ultimately, become as sacred as movies supposedly were in Thomson's cinematic golden age.
But director Mike Figgis argued that video and TV film networks had given access to great films to people previously oblivious to cinema's treasures. Video and TV film networks allowed hoi polloi to refine their cinematic sensibilities. Once, only the privileged few were initiated into the secret rites of moviedom - they disappeared into the inner sanctums of the BFI or university film-studies departments. Now everyone can become a film worshipper, thanks to video and archival movie channels.
Figgis's is an optimistic vision. Instead of tasteful worship, there is also, in the video age, scope for bathing in oceans of trash and exercising degraded and degrading control: freeze-framing the tongue-biting moment; rewinding and replaying the scene again and again. Video facilitates perversion as well as empowering viewers.
Turner Classic Movies bears out Figgis's view. The first film shown when TCM was launched in Britain a couple of weeks ago was the new cut of The Big Sleep, complete with scenes edited from the baffling original version. Film was resuscitated here as quasi-religious artefact and we were invited to bow down before the altar of Bogart and Bacall's greatest film, after a short introduction from an American film academic, a high priest manqué. But such worship now is hardly a communal affair: the virtual community of at-home movie viewers, for good or ill, doesn't link us in the same way as sitting in the smoky dark once did.
