Films
Intermissions in early films had a practical purpose: they were needed to facilitate the changing of reels. When Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (Queen Elizabeth), starring Sarah Bernhardt, opened on July 12, 1912, in the Lyceum Theatre in New York City, the four reel film was shown in four acts, with an intermission between each reel change.
The technology improved, but as movies became progressively longer, the intermission fulfilled other needs. It gave the audience a breather, and provided the theatre management an opportunity to entice patrons to its profitable concession stand. A 1957 animated musical snipe suggested, before the main feature in theatres and during intermission at drive-ins, "let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat".
The intermission has been phased out, the victim of the demand to pack in more screenings, advances in projector technology which make reel switches either unnoticeable or non-existent (such as digital projection, where reels also no longer exist) and also because in multiplexes, the break gave patrons a better opportunity to sneak away to watch other pictures. The last major mainstream film to feature one was 1982's Gandhi.
Other notable films with intermissions include:
- The Birth of a Nation (1915)
- Gone with the Wind (1939)
- Fantasia (1940)
- Ben-Hur (1959)
- Spartacus (1960)
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
- Doctor Zhivago (1965)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1974)
Read more about this topic: Intermission
Famous quotes containing the word films:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
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—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
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