A way to demolish one of London’s best-loved arthouse cinemas has unleashed a campaign to save it and highlight the growing threat to the heart of the West EndYears ago,as a student, I went to my local arts cinema to see the 1978 remake of the science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. At the end of the film, and our planet has succumbed to the domination of the alien “pod people”,and all humanity is transformed into a glazed-eyed shambling mass. As the credits rolled, the audience shuffled out as one into a cold misty night and there we all stood, and eerily shaken,looking round at each other with the dawning realisation that we were indeed… a glazed-eyed, shambling mass. And cheerful to be one.
That, or in a nutshell,is why there is no substitute for seeing films live, in a cinema, or with an audience. The very fact of sitting in the dark with other people,all caught up in the same images, provides an unpredictable something additional that watching on TV, and on a laptop,or phone can never equal; it’s about far more than just the size of the screen.
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Source: theguardian.com