BRING BACK THE INTERVAL

Films are getting longer, cinema seats are getting more comfortable, and somehow we are still expected to sit there for three hours without leaving. Cutler makes the case for bringing back the intermission.

There is a particular moment during a very long film when the mind begins to wander from whatever enormous drama is unfolding on screen towards a considerably more practical question: how much longer is left?

You resist checking your watch because doing so would illuminate half the row. You shift position. Somebody three seats away has already surrendered and is attempting the awkward sideways journey towards the aisle. When they return ten minutes later, they will have missed something important and will spend the following scene quietly trying to work out what it was.

All of this could be avoided by resurrecting something cinema once understood perfectly well.

The interval.

It is strange that as films have become longer, the opportunity to pause them has largely disappeared. Three hour running times no longer feel particularly extraordinary, yet audiences are expected to remain seated from the first studio ident until the final credits as though standing up halfway through would somehow violate the artistic integrity of the picture.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider.

WHEN CINEMA WAS AN OCCASION

The interval belonged to an era when going to the cinema could occupy an entire evening. Picture palaces were designed not merely as rooms containing screens, but as destinations. There were enormous foyers, sweeping staircases, bars, restaurants, uniformed attendants and enough architectural drama to make arriving feel like the beginning of the entertainment.

Longer films frequently accommodated an intermission. Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and 2001: A Space Odyssey are among the great films associated with the practice. The pause was not necessarily an inconvenience imposed upon the work. In some cases, it was built into its rhythm.

There might even be an overture before the picture and entr'acte music as the audience returned. Cinema borrowed something from theatre: the understanding that anticipation could be part of the experience.

The lights came up, people stretched their legs, bought a drink, discussed what they had just seen and returned for the second half.

Nothing terrible happened to the film.

FILMS HAVE BECOME LONG AGAIN

For a while, the interval seemed increasingly unnecessary. A film lasting ninety or a hundred minutes hardly requires one. But contemporary cinema has rediscovered the epic running time without rediscovering the infrastructure that once made an epic comfortable to watch.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer runs for around three hours. Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon considerably exceeds it. Avatar: The Way of Water asks for more than three hours of its audience, while major franchise films regularly drift well beyond the two and a half hour mark.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a long film. Some stories deserve time. The peculiar assumption is that respecting a filmmaker's ambition requires the audience to suppress ordinary human biology.

A four hour stage production would almost certainly include an interval. Nobody would suggest that allowing the audience fifteen minutes to order a drink had destroyed Shakespeare. Opera has survived centuries despite permitting people to occasionally stand up.

Cinema could probably withstand it too.

THE PLEASURE OF TALKING ABOUT THE FIRST HALF

There is another reason to bring it back that has very little to do with comfort.

An interval allows a film to breathe.

Think of leaving the auditorium halfway through something genuinely good. You are still inside its world, but suddenly you can talk. What do you think is happening? Did you notice that look? Do you trust him? What do you think she is going to do?

For fifteen minutes, nobody knows the answer.

That uncertainty is delicious.

Streaming has changed the way we discuss films because almost everybody is at a different point. Conversations become negotiations around spoilers. The cinema briefly solves that problem by putting hundreds of people at precisely the same moment in a story. An interval would give them permission to enjoy it.

Then the bell sounds, everybody returns to their seats and the conversation stops.

There is something wonderfully civilised about that.

THE CINEMA BAR DESERVES BETTER

Many cinemas still have beautiful bars. We simply don't spend much time in them.

We arrive shortly before the film, hurriedly buy something and carry it into the auditorium. When the film ends, particularly after three hours, the instinct is usually to leave. The bar becomes somewhere passed through rather than part of the evening.

An interval could change that.

Imagine twenty minutes halfway through the film. A glass of wine. An espresso. Ice cream if we are feeling traditional. The room full of people talking about exactly the same thing. Suddenly the cinema begins to feel social again rather than simply a larger screen than the one at home.

Independent cinemas in particular could benefit from this return to ritual. If cinemas are competing with enormous televisions, streaming libraries and sofas, they should not attempt to imitate the convenience of staying home. They should offer what home cannot.

Make going out feel like going out.

AND YES, YOU CAN GO TO THE LOO

We should probably acknowledge the least glamorous but most persuasive argument.

People need the lavatory.

The relationship between a large cinema drink and a three hour film is an act of extraordinary optimism. Audiences are left choosing between dehydration and missing a scene for which they have paid.

There are now apps devoted to telling cinema goers the least damaging moment in a film to leave for several minutes. The fact that such a service needs to exist suggests we may have overcomplicated the solution.

Pause the film.

Nobody should need an algorithm to tell them when they can go to the loo.

WOULD IT RUIN THE FILM?

The obvious objection is artistic. A filmmaker has constructed a particular rhythm and an arbitrary twenty minute break could destroy it.

Fair enough.

Not every film needs an interval and nobody is suggesting stopping a ninety minute thriller just as the murderer enters the house. The interval should return for films long enough to benefit from one, ideally with the filmmaker involved in choosing where it falls.

That distinction matters. A badly placed interruption would be irritating. A deliberately constructed intermission can become part of the storytelling.

Some films already contain natural divisions. Others could be written with one. A particularly powerful scene before the interval can leave an audience suspended for fifteen minutes, while the opening of the second half has the opportunity to reintroduce us to the story.

Filmmakers understand acts, chapters, cuts and fades to black. An intermission is simply another piece of punctuation.

PUT SOME GLAMOUR BACK INTO IT

There is also something pleasingly theatrical about the interval itself.

Let the lights rise slowly. Play music. Open the bar. Give people fifteen or twenty minutes rather than the frantic seven minute school break of the multiplex imagination. If the cinema is particularly beautiful, give us enough time to notice it.

We spend a great deal of money constructing spectacular environments for films and comparatively little considering the environment in which people watch them. Yet the memory of seeing a film is often inseparable from the cinema itself.

You remember the enormous screen. The velvet seats. The person beside you. The drink beforehand. Walking into the night afterwards and discovering that the real world looks briefly strange.

The interval can become part of that memory.

CINEMA NEEDS RITUAL

There is endless discussion about how to persuade people back into cinemas. Better screens. Reclining seats. Subscription models. Premium sound. More food delivered directly to your chair.

Perhaps cinema does not need to become more convenient.

Perhaps it needs more ceremony.

Give us beautiful auditoriums. Proper curtains in front of the screen. Programmes occasionally. An overture when a filmmaker is ambitious enough to use one. A bar worth arriving early for. And when a film approaches three hours, give us an interval.

Streaming will always win on convenience. At home we can pause whenever we like, eat dinner halfway through and watch the second half tomorrow. The cinema's advantage is something entirely different. It can turn watching a film into an occasion.

The interval understood that.

Bring it back.