Some Very Fragmented Thoughts on Screen Size

Godard's Notre Musique and Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes (but barely)

When we don’t go to the movies, we watch a movie at home. We choose to control the screen and its programming, we have a pirate software on our TV called My Family Cinema. It communicates the intimacy of film. The sudden change from the big screen to the small TV, its bad speakers and the shelf full of tchotchkes permits anything. Although we both own notebook computers, we always watch everything on the TV, I sometimes watch things on my second monitor, but only if I am working. Our apartment is a multiplex movie theater.

Our resignation to the TV is not one without choice. We have multiple lighting configurations. Our film watching is seldom static, we move on the couch. We clean while watching things, tidy the bookshelf, put things away. The TV stays in place, it is a thing.

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There is something special to the small screen in the theater. Rather, the shrinking of the screen. We watched Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes (2024, Wes Ball) at a weird theater, part of a cineplex chain but lacking any big screens at that particular location. The new Planet of The Apes is not a small screen film, but like any blockbuster film, it will eventually get demoted to smaller and smaller screens, eventually reaching the home and its seemingly unlimited possibilities of watching a film—I once saw a fridge for sale that had a small TV built onto it, and it will eventually screen Planet of The Apes.

On Tuesday morning I watched Godard’s Notre Musique (2004) on possibly the smallest a movie theater’s screen can get. Nothing new as most art cinema tends to reside in smaller rooms either because of a lack of crowd or because it tends to be less spectacular than Hollywood.

Notre Musique is currently being shown at the Mk2 Beaubourg as a rerelease, and just that, not as an event such as the May The 4th rerelease of The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999). It is bound to be enslaved to a small screen as it is not having a normal run as a new release would. A new release will generally get smaller in theaters if it merits a long run as most successful blockbusters do. The screen gets smaller and smaller until it disappears into the internet, with its clips being cut up and distributed on YouTube, out of context.

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Once a superhero film gets demoted to a smaller room, closer to it leaving the theater, it becomes a defective product which can still be enjoyed. This kind of demotion reminds me of racks of clothes at department stores which are damaged but can still be bought, the sign clearly saying:

NO REFUNDS. NO EXCHANGES.

There is something wrong with the big movie on the small screen, it feels wrong, but somehow nothing is really lost. Avengers becomes Notre Musique.

The more intimate setting of the smaller room cannot go unnoticed. The screen is much closer to us, and with fewer chairs, the experience becomes a more individual one. Not only that, the smaller screen is reminiscent of the early days of cinema, it calls back to the ‘lifelikeness’ reality the medium praised in its beginning. Earlier projections would praise the human proportions of the projection over a spectacular size. If Thomas Elseasser assumes world cinema as being more realist than Hollywood, maybe its screen size plays a part in it.

On screen size, Mary Ann Doane writes that “widescreen processes facilitated the transformation of time and history into space.” I have often felt that the smaller the screen is, the more I feel time passing slowly. The bigger screen also facilitates the feeling of cinema as one with the theater “expanding the horizontal angle of view to such an extent that there [is], for all intents and purposes, no sense of any borders at the edges of the frame.” (Doane in “…”)

The cinematic experience is thus volatile to the space in which it finds itself. Although some films are projected for specific spaces, most are often fitted to any screen.

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Usually, the smaller the TV, the cheaper it gets. Sometimes, the TV, like our own, is cheap and big, the image looses its sharpness, the sound distorts in space. With the exception of IMAX, the theater rarely reduces the price of its experience based on screen size. Cinema is a colorful lottery scratch card, the price is fixed, but not every experience gets a reward.

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The credits roll, the lights are turned on. The thought is interrupted and the screen is real now because it is surrounded by walls and not the darkness of “space.” But the credits roll for a while to show the screen there and I can opt to leave and sometimes it depends if I leave or not, but I usually do. I like it when the credits roll and I am asleep.