Silence is golden

Peter Calder's ideal audience. Photo / Supplied

A plaintive comment on my last post about latecomers came from someone who "had to shush people at each and every of the seven screenings I attended over the weekend".

Pausing briefly to salute the commenter's obvious commitment (seven films in a weekend gives this person serious credibility) I can only say: Don't. Get. Me. Started.

In the real world (outside festival time), my only regularly bad experiences with talkers at the movies have been at the Bridgeway, which has a higher-than-normal count of elderly patrons whose main reasons for going to the pictures are to get out of the house and catch up with friends.

If they do stop talking and watch the film, they begin a running commentary, confirming with each other that they are keeping up ("That's the boyfriend's car"); giving vent to their anxieties ("I don't think he's going to make it in time"); or demonstrating the origin of the expression "lost the plot" ("Who's that chap in the blue suit? Have we seen him before?")

Usually I find a seat as far as possible from everyone else and let them go for it. It's the high point of their week, after all, and I'm getting paid to be there.

I'm a good deal less sanguine about chatterers at the Rialto and Lido, and I get positively apoplectic at the festival when people settle down for a right old natter or emote loudly at every opportunity.

For reasons I'm not sure that I can explain - is it misplaced liberal guilt? - I am tolerant of ethnic minorities who turn out in droves to that rarest of things, a film from their native country. Perhaps chatter that you can't understand a world of is not as bad as a conversation you are forced to eavesdrop on. When the Iranians at a Kiarostami picture babble away (I assume they are saying "That's the building where Safar used to work" or "Pshaw! The No. 32 bus doesn't go up that street") it seems to add to the experience. It's also fun to wonder why they are hooting with laughter at a line that just doesn't seem funny in the subtitles.

But the hard-core chatterers, the texters, the loud emoters - they are a different matter. If there's one thing worse than a latecomer, it's a talker. And a latecomer who then starts talking? Whipping's too good for them, I reckon.

My earliest memories of moviegoing don't have any talkers in them. Maybe I'm misremembering, to borrow Hillary Clinton's expression, but I think that people sat in stunned silence because the cinema, with monaural sound and Technicolor, was the cutting edge of new technology. Now, when the talk is all of multimedia and delivery platforms and films are called franchises, perhaps our minds are so fractionated that shutting up and paying attention for 100 minutes is just beyond some people.

At the end of a festival film (I can't remember which) some years ago, as the credits started rolling, an elderly bloke in front of me turned to the chap he was with. "Well, Sid, he said, "I didn't have the faintest bloody idea what that was about."

That's not chattering. It's analysis. And what makes it one rather than the other is that he waited till the end to say it. I wanted to shake his hand and thank him but he wouldn't have had the faintest bloody idea what I was on about. He was just being courteous.