Pioneering

You probably have a favorite movie theater. Perhaps it's the Pioneer. Perhaps it's not. But your appreciation of that theater probably comes from the movies you've seen there and the conditions in which you've seen them. Perhaps your appreciation comes from both; however, those two can be made into relatively discrete elements. The movies themselves could be extricated from that theater and shown elsewhere, perhaps in just as nice an environment, and the theater itself could show other movies in just as nice conditions. The two independent elements together create the experience you treasure.

Yet there does exist an alternate tradition in cinematic exhibition, what we can call the "site specific" tradition. In this tradition, the artwork of the movie merges with the presentation conditions to create something larger, something that is not inherently repeatable in the same way exactly the same again and again and elsewhere, as is usually the case with movies. The movie itself merges with its surroundings, so that combined they move toward becoming a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork.

Today, Monday November 14, the Pioneer again indulges that tradition in our presentation of THE TINGLER, a movie we have presented several times since this summer. This will be the last performance of this film, at least for the foreseeable future, so if you have not come yet you must come now.


Vincent Price is Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist researching fear's physical manifestations. Chapin discovers that an actual creature grows within the human back when we are in fear, and only our screaming renders that creature - which he calls the tingler - impotent. When Chapin and his friend Ollie realize that someone they know is unable to scream, and thus unable to put down the tingler in their back, a plot is hatched to capture her tingler itself. Eventually, the tingler gets loose in a movie theater.

And here is where THE TINGLER passes beyond "the movies" and toward the total artwork. The theater itself is transformed into the theater in which the tingler is loose. The theater staff themselves become players in making that transformation, and you the audience do, too. The effect comes not just from the movie and its standard presentation within the theater, but is fused with the performance of the projectionist and the ushers who have become players in a performance of which the film is only a part, albeit, a major part.

How exactly does that happen at the Pioneer? Well, of course, it depends. And you will have to come and see.

Tickets for THE TINGLER are here.


Some more reading on site specific cinema:

Sergei Eisenstein, "Through Theater to Cinema." FILM FORM: ESSAYS IN FILM THEORY. Trans. Jay Leyda. Amazon page.

Jennifer Macmillan, "Becoming." Invisible Cinema: Living experimental film and video blog.

R.P., "Three Films from the Middle East."

R.P. and James Kreul, "A Cinema of Possibilities: Interview with Brian Frye."

R.P. and James Kreul, "The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher." Search down for "I don't want to cast aspersions" (last quarter of essay).

Rocky Horror Picture Show Audience Participation

The Rolling Road Show

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, "Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World."

Richard Wagner, "The Artwork of the Future."

Ron Waite, "The William Castle Story."

post script December 7, 2005
Soon after writing this piece, I discovered the wonderful recent issue of Millennium Film Journal: #43-44, "Paracinema / Performance." This is a major volume with important articles by Paul Arthur and Bradley Eros, among others. Strongly endorsed.