For 24 hours only Double Wonderful opened a non-stop cinema where patrons could come and go at their leisure. It was an eye-opening abandonment of cinema norms.
The movie theatre has become a space fraught with controversy, and rarely because of the film being screened. It feels as if we rarely see out the month without someone complaining online about the flagrant disregard of cinema etiquette, be that attendees talking loudly, using their phones during the film or guffawing at inappropriate moments. This behaviour is so commonplace that the Prince Charles Cinema has done away with its kitschy John Waters pre-movie public service announcement and replaced it with a polite but pointed request for audience members to “be in the movie, not above it”.
But what if there was a space that – instead of reinstating the etiquette of the cinema – actively encouraged its attendees to rebel against it? This was Dan Wilkinson’s intention, when he decided to put on a free 24 Hour Cinema event in Kentish Town as part of his event cinema programme Double Wonderful. Inviting attendees to stay for as little or as long as they wished, with no fixed start times and no pre-release of the titles on display, Dan set out to create a cinematic setting that indulged in the chaos of the public rather than denying it. After three cups of coffee, armed with a cushion, I turned up to see what an event that promised to throw out the cinema’s rulebook would be like. So did 160 other curious attendees who came and went across the 24 hours.
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With each hour this makeshift theatre’s atmosphere was calibrated by the ebbs and flows of an ever changing audience. Runners popped in while they caught their breath and attendees dropped by while going about their daily chores. When I arrived at 10pm there were guests who stepped into the space the same way one enters a library, creeping delicately towards vacant chairs, but by midnight the place was humming with a vibrant crowd matching the chaotic energy of Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom! on screen. A fizzing chorus came in fits and starts from the aisles as tinnies and bottles were cracked open, with a backing track of voices as the crowd claimed and relinquished their places.
I once watched Pulse next to a man whose nicotine addiction required him to leave the venue multiple times during what is one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s most thrilling films, with pungent wafts of stale cigarette smoke building each time he returned to the neighboring seat. For the first time ever I thought of that restless stranger fondly – he belonged here.
Per Double Wonderful’s manifesto for the event, every film was delivered with a cold open, encouraging attendees to relinquish control of their viewing experience. This refusal to offer transparency questions our need to turn cinema (like almost all hobbies) into a logged, promoted and therefore braggadocious sport, diminishing every film to a statistic while encouraging completionist habits. Many audience members happily embraced this imposed spontaneity; when the title card for François Ozon’s X2000 lit up the screen, someone behind me gasped, “It’s a French one, I’m gonna have to stay!”
Playing title roulette at the cinema might not be for everyone – Barry Pierce once likened the Prince Charles Cinema’s Mystery Movie Marathon to an obscure form of torture where the victim is slowly devoured by insects – but there are clearly those who enjoy this game. Of course it helps when the programmer has more interest in inspiring (and titillating) attendees than punishing them. Alongside the household names were many lesser known and rarely screened titles, such as Boris Gerrets’ People I Could Be And Maybe Am (in which one man with a handheld camera becomes entangled in the lives of his nocturnal subjects), Sion Sono’s nihilistic Yakuza movie Bad Film, and, aptly, Arran Ashan and Mustafa Mohamoud’s 6 TILL 6 documenting 24 hours in East London. Dan had no intended themes running through his setlist, but saw many of the titles as “filmic orphans” as they are titles that “nobody else would take a chance on”.
It’s a sentiment which the space itself echoed, as overnight it became a home for those who didn’t want to go to bed or the chicken shop after every other venue had closed its doors. Comfortably propped up against the wall were Kleo and Abijan. Kleo had only been awake for the past hour when I spoke to him, having dozed off from about 6am till 9am. He has nothing of the groggy disgruntled air you would expect from a man surviving on very little sleep, explaining the space is calming to him because it’s a place for “the day’s rejects”. But not all that attended the 24 Hour Cinema had come to test their endurance levels. Abijan didn’t feel the need to commit like Kleo did, only joining him in daylight hours. “I’m gonna come watch a film for breakfast,” she said.
The radically relaxed nature of Double Wonderful’s event made it a hybrid space – somewhere between a movie theatre and a community centre – but also a performance in itself. Or at least that’s how audience member Tom saw it. “I’m usually not a back of the cinema guy” he admitted as a committed cinephile who was there for seven hours over the course of the night. Tom left to pick up his mum, Karen, from the station and returned with her and a suitcase in tow for the final morning hours. He respects the etiquette of his regular cinemas and even struggles with those that don’t have any, but here he found he was able to relinquish his need for control. For him it’s like “sitting at the back of the bus” – watching the room, rather than the films.
Like all of the event’s supporters, Jude, a collaborator and actor in many of Dan’s films, was just as committed to the project, surviving the entire 24 hours on one can of Monster. Buoyed by his various friends who dropped in and out, he enjoyed the “messy” uncertain nature of the event, flitting from the screen to the groups smoking on the street. He lamented a lack of 24 hour spaces in London, explaining he heard about an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie Bradshaw even goes on a date in New York at 5am. It’s a plotline that Jude offers like it’s an urban legend – a long lost land where a city actually accommodates its night owls.
This is where the biggest problem lies for Double Wonderful’s 24 Hour Cinema – the surrounding infrastructure doesn’t support it. Dan was well aware of this issue as he embarked on the project: “it all started when they wouldn’t allow that Greggs [on Kentish Town Road] to be 24 hours”. I see his point: by midnight the neighboring streets are all but deserted and pubs are stacking their stools, with only a few corner shops staying lit for emergency beers or BuzzBallz. Although this isn’t the fault of the organisers, it does speak to the issue at hand. For those who want London to become a 24 hour city once again, we will have to endure some inconvenience before the market responds to the growing nightlife, and push back against restrictions to make it so.
I embarked on this event expecting to come across many wired, tired people proudly bragging about how long they’d manage to stay the course. Instead I found a rare space – one that encouraged an anarchic approach to spectatorship that I had never witnessed before. Double Wonderful’s commitment to allowing its attendees to use this temporary cinema as they saw fit ultimately encouraged viewers to embrace the moment both on and off screen, and left me to wonder whether our obsession with cinema etiquette stems from an inability to relinquish control over public spaces and accept the inevitable friction that is other people.
