The French have made numerous contributions to the development of cinema as art. With the film magazine \Cahiers du Cinema"" they ushered in a new respectability to film criticism and theory. The French New Wave of the 1960s has been heralded as the beginning of the modern age of film. But the newest motion of the French government would help preserve cinematic art from yet another angle: by disabling movie patrons' cell phones for the duration of a screening.
As reported last week by the BBC, the French government has decided to move ahead with a plan to install equipment in theatres that disables cellular phone frequencies inside the screening rooms of movie theatres. This course of action has also been approved by the President of the National Federation of French Cinemas and the French Telecommunications Regulation Authority. To be fair, the French aren't actually the first to come up with this notion. In 2003, Ward Anderson, owner of 200 cinemas in Ireland, was told that installing a jamming signal for cell phones was illegal. In a similar effort, that same year New York City said it would fine anyone fifty dollars if their cellular device disturbed a play or concert, although you can easily imagine how impractical this policy would be to enforce. There are numerous individual theatre owners around the globe who have been trying different methods to keep down the rate of cellular interruptions, but it seems that France is the first country where the telecommunications regulation industry, the government and theatre owners are in agreement that action needs to be taken.
Nothing more needs to be said about the annoyance of cell phones going off during movies, except that those painfully awful public service announcements before the movie telling people to silence them aren't working. Cell phones are still ringing, and a percentage of people (who will be damned to movie hell) are even answering them. Even the most serious cinephile forgets to silence their phone every once in while, rendering them in a state of shame and embarrassment as they realize they've become the thing they hate. One can only hope that the plan actually gets enacted in France, and that it's successful. Then maybe the U.S. can adopt the same strategy, although I'm sure that it would be bogged down in bureaucratic red tape for years before ever being enacted.
The only reasonable argument against this policy is that of emergencies. The user comment section of the BBC's online article showed that there was a percentage of readers against the cell phone ban because it would prevent them from being contacted in case of an emergency, most specifically in the case of babysitters. It's at least a semi reasonable objection. Every parent has a certain amount of apprehension about leaving young children behind, but common sense needs to prevail. Theatre has been around since the Greeks and Romans, and somehow life went on. Movies were around for roughly a century before cellular phones became common place, and children somehow managed to avoid extinction.
If you have some reasonable notion of an emergency that might occur, why are you going to the movies in the first place? Isn't the whole point to escape and relax? Either find a movie that the whole family can go to or tough it out and stay home. I'm sure ""Taxi"" will be just as marvelously awful on video as it is on the big screen.
Dan Marfield's column runs every Monday. To date, his cell phone has never gone off during a movie, although it did once during a history final. You can contact him at ddmarfield@wisc.edu
