The experience was fun, 10am on a rainy Saturday morning, late in the film's run so the theatre was only half full, all families. Lots of kids. Talkative kids. Which is fine, of course, kids are like that (although mine mostly had the sense to whisper, and isn't a loud child anyway). The family behind me had a rather talkative five-year-old girl, who didn't bother me in the least. No, it was her mum who (a) didn't make any attempt to teach the child about the importance of being quiet in the cinema, (b) responded to the child's questions in the same volume of voice as they were asked, and (c) left her phone on and let it ring out. To misquote Ghandi: "Western civilisation? That would be nice." More on cinema etiquette here, by the way.
None of this spoiled my enjoyment (or at least, I wasn't willing to let it) of what was a very moving occasion--the film was fine, very enjoyable, but it was the sight of my daughter's enrapturement with the dark room and the big screen, the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and fulfilling love affair between her and the cinema. I was very proud of her, too, she's barely two and she sat through the whole film, only getting restless in the first half of the (rather long) final act. Most of her peers would have been climbing the walls after the first ten minutes. I was filled with joy at her engagement with the experience, and saddened too at the thought that perhaps she will outlive cinema as a form of entertainment. Who knows what'll have happened to the cinema-going experience by the time she reaches the age of twenty-one, in 2030?
I was also reminded too of a recent discussion elsewhere on this site about art versus commerce in film-making, and the point made, by Mike Jones, I believe, that story-telling is nothing without an audience. I was also reminded of some of the great cinema-going experiences of my own life: Jaws in the Savoy in Dublin in 1976, as a six-year-old, burying my head in my aunt Marie's lap in terror (six years later she was dead, taken young by breast cancer). Om Shanti Om in a huge theatre in Ernakulam, Kerala, with the afternoon matinee crowd, singing along to the twenty-minute dance sequence early in the second act. War of the Worlds in 2005, at a multi-plex on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten, with an audience of locals, creoles mostly, who commented loudly on every beat: "Oh my God, it's coming over the hill there!" This wasn't my favourite experience until I watched Kung Fu Hustle in the same cinema, with much the same audience, and the booming, rolling laughter of the West Indians carried me along on a sea of fun. The experience of watching a film is different depending on the context in which it's watched.
I get hope from this--cinema is a community experience, and perhaps this shall be its salvation. Much depends on the continuing quality of the entertainment - Hollywood studios recently admitted that the fall in cinema attendances over recent months in the US had much to do with the paucity of quality movies, especially when taken in the context of ticket prices. Presumably, for "quality movies", one can read "movies which engage an audience".
I'll never forget Vallie's first trip to the cinema. Pity she won't remember it herself, of course.