A Review of the History of Live Shows Projected in Movie Theatres - Text 2
In this initial phase of attempting to structure the “tele-cinema” market carried out by a few Hollywood companies (Warner, Fox in association with RCA, Paramount) and exhibition circuits (Balaban & Katz, National Theaters), supply was basically built around boxing and football matches. Capturing and transmitting live entertainment often ran up against the problem of obtaining the rights, which cinema and home television were already fighting over, but also that of cumbersome negotiations with stage and screen actor and technician unions. But sports also appeared to be better suited to the technical capabilities of the new medium and to the transmission network (short wave, coaxial cable or the telephone network), as the bandwidth was not sufficient to obtain the image quality sought when projected. While critics heaped praise on the first Metropolitan Opera transmission in December 1952, Carmen (thirty-one venues in twenty-six cities for a total of 67,000 viewers), for its aesthetic force (seen in particular as a result of the intimacy of the close-up) and the sense it conveyed of being present at the event because it was live, they were more reserved on the topic of the technical quality of the capturing, carried out with four stationary movie cameras, and of the coaxial cable transmission provided by AT&T. The low-definition images were in black and white, and the sound was monophonic. The images were also projected onto fairly small screens (ranging from two metres wide in the early 1930s to around seven metres in 1947), similar to those found in theatres showing newsreels. The works’ added value appeared to reside more in the novel nature of the experience (“I was there, I saw it live at the same time as the audience at the Met”) than in the still fragile technological performance.
