The new climate havens: packed cinemas and empty beaches

Sunday, Rome, 38 degrees. At half past two in the afternoon – the time of day when, in August, the city should be dead quiet – there’s a queue outside the multiplex cinema. A proper queue, sheltered under the arcades. Just like at Christmas for Checco Zalone, but with people in flip-flops, shorts and carrying insulated water bottles. I had taken the children to see Spider-Man; I was convinced we would have the nearly deserted cinema to ourselves. I had expected four daredevils braving the health alert and the “new children’s lockdown”, as La Repubblica puts it. Not a chance. I found a sweaty crowd split evenly between Spider-Man, Nolan’s Odyssey and the melodious, irresistible call of the air conditioning. Sitting next to my children were not the usual Marvel franchise crowd: not just nerds, teenagers and fifty-something film buffs in Captain America T-shirts, but also ladies with fans, elderly people, mostly on their own. Grandparents without grandchildren, clutching a bucket of popcorn, in raptures as Tom Holland and Zendaya made out amongst the cobwebs. An atmosphere more reminiscent of the Festa dell’Unità than a blockbuster.

The day before we had gone to the seaside, and there was hardly anyone there: numerous closed parasols, sun loungers piled up, the melancholic beach from those Reels that have now become a summer staple of scrolling through Instagram – this is Viareggio on 5 August! And down came the indignant comments about the exorbitant price of beach umbrellas, the ten-euro spritz, and the unbearable heat that now makes even the sea a bit of a torture. But we’ve been seeing empty beaches for a while now. Crowded cinemas, on the other hand, are a novelty here. Perhaps it’s the effect of the ‘Great Cold’, referring to Gualtieri’s very ‘Veltronian’ initiative which has transformed Rome’s cinemas into ‘cultural climate shelters’ – meaning you get in for free on ‘red alert’ days, when the heatwave warning is in force, the ‘peak’. Rome is filling up with shelters: there’s even a ‘phyto-bioclimatic’ one, inaugurated in Centocelle, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a fanfare from the municipal police, and a moved councillor: an ‘oasis’, a ‘green room’, a lattice-work tensile structure with ‘climbing plants to provide shade and misters to cool the air’. It looks like a gazebo for the Campo Largo primaries, with decorative plants and sprays of water to clear one’s head. A bit of a remedy for the swelter, a bit of a ‘do-nothing’ solution.

Signs of climate change: no more old-fashioned ‘pizza and cinema’ evenings, as in the twentieth century, but ‘pizza and climate-cultural refuge’ with a stop at that ‘phyto-bioclimatic’ spot, gasping for breath amongst wisteria and climbing American vine, whilst waiting for the fallout shelter inside Metro Line C. But in these new ‘fridge-cinemas’, one could also organise many themed film seasons, rediscover old genres, and indulge the penchant for the cold by recalibrating the programme to ‘red-label’ standards: rediscovering the Bergfilm, for example, that great German cinema of the 1920s featuring mountains, glaciers, avalanches and rope teams suspended in mid-air, in which a young Leni Riefenstahl excelled. Or the genre of adventures in the ice, such as "SOS Eisberg" (1933), featuring aeroplanes lost in the crevasses of Greenland, or the great polar documentaries, such as Flaherty’s "Nanook of the North", and Scott’s men freezing in Antarctica in Herbert Ponting’s footage. A feast for the eyes: two hours of blizzards and snowfields, making you dream of turtleneck jumpers and padded down jackets.

In France, whilst temperatures soared past forty degrees at the end of June and schools were closing in some areas, cinemas recorded over three million admissions: sixty-eight per cent more than the previous year, more than a third above pre-Covid levels – and that was before Nolan’s "Odyssey" had even been released; it was simply people fleeing the sweltering heat. Then came the Fête du cinéma, with tickets at five euros, and admissions rose to nearly four million – the second-best result of the decade – and, not insignificantly, the World Cup was also underway (even though Les Bleus were knocked out early). ‘But the French and the cinema, well, you know,’ you might say. And yet, even in France, summer cinema has always been a bit of a struggle. Although it wasn’t quite as dead as it was here. We grew up in a world where, between late May and August, cinemas would pull down the shutters, surviving on stock clearance films, B-grade horror films, and the odd repeat screening – those Henry “Rain of Blood” films that Nanni Moretti goes to see, horrified, on his Vespa, at the start of Caro Diario, in a very deserted Rome that is still identical to that of Il Sorpasso (though the years separating us from that Moretti are now more than those that separated Caro Diario from Il Sorpasso, so to speak). In short, cinema was all about the open-air venues: the white screen in the courtyard, the plastic chairs, the film clubs, the open-air film festivals with post-screening discussions, or the summer deluge of plaques, trophies, cups and lifetime achievement awards for retired actors, handed out by local tourist boards and cultural departments during ‘under the stars’ evenings. Then, thankfully, the multiplexes arrived. And the multiplex, which never takes a holiday – just like everyone else, for that matter – offers the latest releases, shelter from the elements but also a valid alternative for those who can’t stand the open-air cinemas – the stifling heat, the mosquitoes, the ants crawling up your calves, people taking their shoes off on the blanket spread out on the grass, whilst the film’s soundtrack fades into the air, mingling with the traffic, the clamour, and the sirens of ambulances and police cars. It remains to be seen, however, what really drives all these people into the cinemas in August. Is it down to the films – Nolan’s "Odysssey", the latest "Spider-Man" – without which no such surge would have been possible? Or is it down to the air conditioning, and thus a climate that will ultimately kill us but, in the meantime, is reviving great cinema?

As is well known, it was "Jaws", in the summer of 1975, that changed the way major Hollywood films were distributed. Spielberg’s film was literally designed to empty the beaches and fill the cinemas, and from then on it transformed the summer into a potential goldmine (in Italy, however, it was released in December, just before Christmas; there was no playing on the summer holiday theme, and it ended up trailing behind Amici miei at the box office). But whilst the ‘summer blockbuster’ was an invention of the 1970s, Hollywood almost immediately discovered the allure of air conditioning as an added element to the cinema experience. It’s an interesting story and worth a few lines. Like all the objects and inventions that deserve the Nobel Peace Prize – the baby’s dummy, the dishwasher, deodorant – air conditioning, too, has a fascinating history behind it. First of all, it wasn’t invented for us. The very first air conditioning system was used to keep reams of paper comfortable in a Brooklyn printing works – Sackett & Wilhelms. In summer, the paper would swell, curl up and eventually have to be thrown away. An engineer in his early twenties, fresh out of Cornell, Willis Carrier – may he rest in peace – built a machine that drew air through a mist of cold water. The cooling effect was a by-product. For a good twenty years, the air conditioner remained an industrial affair, a factory tool. It was installed in cotton mills (where a certain Stuart Cramer, in 1906, also coined the term ‘air conditioning’). Then in pharmaceutical factories, in plants producing celluloid film – which warps and catches fire in the heat – and even at Gillette, because damp causes the razor blades to rust. Then came the cinema. Hollywood in the 1920s was the first to realise the potential of large-scale cooling systems. Up until then, the most extensive public use of air conditioning had been seen at Hudson’s department store in Detroit, where, during the sales, with goods piled high in the basement, people would faint whilst shopping. But that was, in fact, an emergency. A measure to prevent fainting – a commercial climate refuge, as Gualtieri would put it. Cooling, however, became a spectacle with the great American ‘Movie Palaces’: elegant auditoriums, equipped with every comfort, modelled on the grand Italian opera houses. Willis Carrier, the man behind the reams of paper, demonstrated the wonders of his invention to Paramount, which at the time owned a vast number of cinemas. In 1925, the first system was installed at the Rivoli, right in the heart of Times Square. It was a huge success. Things went so well that within a few years all the elegant cinemas across America were displaying the same banner on their pavements, more effective than the posters featuring Garbo and Valentino: ‘Cooled by Refrigeration’. Twenty degrees cooler – come on in! In short, the cinema is, quite literally, the place where we discovered air conditioning as we know it. Before it found its way into homes – something that would not happen until the 1950s and 1960s – artificial coolness was something you went to buy at the box office. It was part of the greatest show on earth. A piece of the magic, like the grand chandeliers, the ushers in white gloves, and the carpet you could sink into up to your ankles. In an America that was gasping for breath in the summer and had nothing at home, the factory worker and the typist would buy themselves two hours of air-conditioned paradise for just a few dollars. July became a month for making a fortune, and to fill it, they needed massive films. The summer blockbuster stems from there. Jaws is also a child of air conditioning.

Here, however, back in the nineties, it was still the case that the seats would stick to your back, with the sole air-conditioner wheezing away, blowing lukewarm air onto the front rows and nothing at the back, and a sign written in felt-tip pen – ‘system under repair’. Not that anyone went to the cinema in the summer anyway. These were the years when the first multiplexes arrived here too, naturally chronically late – the usual twenty to thirty years after everywhere else – just like colour TV, McDonald’s and Uber. Like these things, the multiplexes were also met with utter indignation… oh, cinemas like supermarkets, my dear lady, where on earth are we heading! The film “reduced to a commodity on the shelf”, “films for sale like hams”, as L’Unità put it. Horrors. Meanwhile, the multiplexes were opening. They were few and far between: Vicenza, Verona, then the Warner Village in Casamassima near Bari, then Rome, but on the Raccordo ring road, at the Magliana exit. Filmmakers and intellectuals signed petitions to defend the old single-screen cinemas, to resist the ‘cathedrals of consumption’ – dust, mould and odours included – treated as madeleines of the true cinematic ‘experience’ of yesteryear. In those ‘cathedrals of consumption’, however, it was comfortable and cool. Cinema-goers did not heed the appeal. They wanted the big screen, not the ‘postage stamp’ created by cutting a single-screen cinema into four. They wanted comfort, fresh air and sound that wasn’t crackly. Following the mass closure of cinemas in the 1980s, admissions surged by twenty per cent in the late 1990s – driven, admittedly, by Titanic and Life Is Beautiful, but also by the fact that multiplexes were pleasant places to be, with parking and food available, and, what’s more, these ‘barbarians’ even had the audacity to have air conditioning.

Because even when it comes to the cold, opinions are divided, just as they are on everything else. Here too, there are two schools of thought: on the one hand, the arthouse cinema, the neighbourhood single-screen cinema, the arthouse film festival – there, the air conditioning is a whisper, a gentle breeze, a polite touch for which one almost apologises, and if it isn’t there, so much the better. You sweat a little, but with dignity, because a bone-chilling cold would be vulgar, American, incompatible with the art of cinema. On the other hand, there’s the multiplex on the ring road, where the exact opposite applies: the cold is arctic, pronounced, flaunted, a bit boorish – precisely the American boast of a century ago, “cooled by refrigeration”. Here, when I take the children to see a film, my wife’s first WhatsApp message is always, ‘Is it cold? Is the air conditioning very strong? I’ve put two sweatshirts in your rucksack – make sure you take them.’ Yet the monster that twenty years ago was accused of killing off the cinema – the multiplex, the megaplex, the funfair, the ‘non-place’, the ‘cathedral of consumption’ with its burgers and car park – is exactly what we’re now defending tooth and nail. Not just out of love for the big screen, but because it’s also proving to be a magnificent escape from the sweltering heat. Those concrete boxes that directors and intellectuals had been calling to keep out of the cities have, without anyone deciding it, also become a form of climate and urban welfare – pardon me, ‘climate-cultural refuges’. That ‘cultural’ aspect always bolsters the argument: air conditioning, yes, but in the service of art – heaven forbid it should be otherwise. And this sinister connotation (the cinema as a refuge, a hospital-like bunker) has nothing inviting, spectacular or seductive about it; it isn’t ‘cooled by refrigeration’; it’s always a bit sad and alarmist, as is our style, but never mind. Yes, I know, if it were just for the air conditioning they’d go to Zara or the supermarket, you might say. But you don’t sit down there, and you spend money. The cinema, on the other hand, is the only place where a pensioner, on an August afternoon, can spend two hours in the cool, perhaps having a bit of fun, for the price of a coffee or thereabouts. Or, as Gualtieri would say, even for free.