I’m thinking digitally

So, I am feeling differently about digital after the Cinema Exhibitors Association roadshow last week. Not least of which in how independents might afford the switch and keep some options open around alternative content and Virtual Print Fee deals. Even if it does mean that working with VPF prevents the full potential of digital being unlocked.

The other reason I’m feeling so positive about digital is that I feel confident cinema will survive despite the changes brought to our lives by the wider world of digital development and web 2.0. Let’s face it, cinema has reinvented itself many times already, did anyone ever expect it wouldn’t in the digital age? And this time the possibilities open to those exhibitors who recognise the full potential of digital are far greater than those offered by any of cinema’s other incarnations.

I came across this online interview with John Knell from the Intelligence Agency chatting to Bill Thompson the other day – in which Knell makes the (tongue in cheek) suggestion that all cinemas should be operating with a sense of impending extinction.

My grandmother was a cinema usherette in Coventry during the war. From an early age I was feed stories about GIs, gas lit auditoriums, nicotine stained cinema screens, mothers who let their children pee on the floor as they didn’t want to take them to the toilet and miss the film and the times they ignored the air raid sirens to stay in the cinema as the bombs that destroyed the city fell all around them. The cinema she knew was different to the one I grew up with – the worn out, divided up auditoriums of the late 70s and early 80s. Pressed up against bingo halls and British Legion social clubs with minimal sound proofing, smokers on one side, intermissions and usherettes with ice cream trays around their necks.

And these faded cinemas, where those of us who are old enough remember the first time Star Wars revitalised their tired screens, are different again from the modern multiplexes that screened the digitally shot Attack of the Clones with glorious Dolby surround sound.

All of these lives are a world away from cinema’s first silent incarnation where people flocked to see the news as well as films. So Knell is right when he claims that cinemas should be operating with an impending sense of extinction, but then they always have. Cinema has become extinct many times and digital is just another reincarnation – if anything one that harks back to cinema's roots and allows ‘alternative content’ to be screened alongside films.

All that’s ever stayed the same in cinema, and ever will, is a dark auditorium, a big screen, a magic lantern and a deep seated desire to momentarily escape from the real world.