For other uses, see Intermission (disambiguation).
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Contents
- 1 Plays
- 1.1 Case study: the plays of William Shakespeare
- 1.2 Kabuki
- 2 Films
- 3 Bollywood
- 4 References
- 5 See also
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An intermission (American English) or interval (British English) is a recess between parts of a performance or production, such as for a theatrical play, opera, concert, or film screening. It should not be confused with an entr'acte (French: "between acts"), which, in the 18th century, was a sung, danced, spoken, or musical performance that occurs between any two acts, that is unrelated to the main performance, and that thus in the world of opera and musical theatre became an orchestral performance that spans an intermission and leads, without a break, into the next act.
Marmontel and Diderot both viewed the interval as a period in which the action did not in fact stop, but continued off-stage. "The interval is a rest for the spectators; not for the action.", wrote Marmontel in 1763. "The characters are deemed to continue acting during the interval from one act to another." However, intervals are more than just dramatic pauses that are parts of the shape of a dramatic structure. They also exist for more mundane reasons, such as that it is hard for audience members to concentrate for more than two hours at a stretch, and actors and performers (for live action performances at any rate) need to rest.[3] They afford opportunity for scene and costume changes. And of course performance venues take advantage of them to sell food and drink.
Psychologically, intervals cause audiences to return to reality, and are a period during which they can engage critical faculties that they have suspended during the performance itself.
Plays[edit]
The term "Broadway Bladder" names "the alleged need of a Broadway audience to urinate every 75 minutes".[5] Broadway Bladder, and other considerations (such as how much revenue a theatre would lose at its bar if there were no interval), govern the placement of intervals within performances, and their existence in performances, such as plays, that were not written/created with intervals in mind.[5]
Case study: the plays of William Shakespeare[edit]
The plays of William Shakespeare were originally intended for theatre performance without intervals. The placement of intervals within those plays in modern performances is thus a matter for the play's director. Reviewer Peter Holland analysed the placement of intervals in 1997:
- Of The Winter's Tale he noted that there was "as natural a break as anyone could wish for" before the speech of Time as Chorus, and that he had never seen a production that placed an interval other than at that point.[5]
- Trevor Nunn's Measure for Measure in 1991 he gave as an example of intervals placed in the middle of a scene. It stopped halfway through act 3 scene 1, moving some of the lines from later in the scene to before the interval.[5]
- Performances of King Lear, he observed, often place the interval "disproportionately late", after the blinding of Gloucester.[5]
- The 1991 RSC production of Julius Caesar directed by Stephen Pimlott he pointed out as noteworthy for its extraordinary interval length. Pimlott had placed the interval after act 4 scene 1, after the action leaves Rome. This allowed the striking of the scenery. But it took sometimes as much as forty minutes for stage crew to remove the scenery, which comprised a "massive set of columns and a doorway" designed by Tobias Hoheisel, a period that was longer than the remaining length of the performance, some thirty-five minutes.[7]
Many modern productions of Shakespeare plays have thus eschewed the introduction of an interval, choosing instead to perform them all of the way through non-stop, as originally intended. Such productions include Peter Hall's 1988 The Tempest; the 1987, 1995, 2001 and 2012 RSC productions of Julius Caesar; the 1988 (RSC), 1992 (RNT), 1999–2000 (RSC), and 2001 (Globe) productions of Macbeth; and the 2001 PRC production of All's Well That Ends Well.
Kabuki[edit]
The intermissions in Kabuki theatre can last up to an hour. Because this often results in people returning to their seats several minutes after the performance has resumed, playwrights generally take to writing "filler" scenes for the starts of acts, containing characters and dialogue that are not important to the overall story.[8]
Films[edit]
Intermissions in early films had a practical purpose: they were needed to facilitate the changing of reels.[9] 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.[10]
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.[11] The last major mainstream film to feature one was 1982's Gandhi.[11]
Other notable films with intermissions include:
- The Birth of a Nation (1915)
- Gone with the Wind (1939)
- Fantasia (1940)
- Ben-Hur (1959)
- Spartacus (1960)
- King of Kings (1961)
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
- Cleopatra (1963)
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
- Doctor Zhivago (1965)
- Help! (1965) (though this is a joke intermission lasting less than even ten seconds)
- The Sound of Music (1965)
- Grand Prix (1966)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- The Godfather (1972)
- The Cowboys (1972)
- Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
- The Godfather: Part II (1974)
- Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975) (like in Help!, this is a short joke intermission)
- Barry Lyndon (1975)
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth (1997)
Bollywood[edit]
Despite the phasing out of intermissions in the West, they have remained prevalent in India, and especially with Bollywood films. There seems to be a mass reluctance to do away with intermissions as they bring a large revenue to cinemas in terms of customers buying snacks during these periods. It seems to work well in Indian cinema, with the usually longer length of Bollywood films compared with films from other parts of the world. Notably, only in 2011, a Bollywood film, Dhobi Ghat (film) was released without an intermission, this being cited as a first in Indian cinema. It is not uncommon in India even for Hollywood films to have intermissions.[12][13]
Bollywood films shown in cinemas in the United Kingdom also commonly include intermissions when shown in cinemas.[14]
It is so common in Bollywood that some films released on DVD contain the "intermission" card note that is inserted into the film for cinematic screening, such as the DVD of Veer-Zaara.[15]
References[edit]
- ^ Andrews 2011, p. 59.
- ^ a b c d e Holland 1997, p. 3.
- ^ Holland 1997, p. 4.
- ^ Brandon 1992, p. 29.
- ^ "History: Intermission". Cliftex: Texas' Oldest, Continuously Operating Movie Theatre. Retrieved May 11, 2012.
- ^ "The Roadshow Era". Cinema Sightlines. Retrieved May 11, 2012.
- ^ a b Peter Hartlaub (December 19, 2003). "Longer movies, bigger drinks and no intermissions equal a new kind of epic struggle in the theater: one bowl to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them". San Francisco Chronicle.
- ^ Sharma. "Do we need the intermission?". THE TIMES OF INDIA. Retrieved 09/08/2012.
- ^ Steph. "Intermission". Retrieved 09/08/2012.
- ^ "Free Movies UK". Retrieved 9 August 2012.
- ^ Blase. "Music paste up: MIA and terrifying things to do with cars, Clean Bandit provide some local sauce, and the dance film season is upon us". Retrieved 09/08/2012.
Sources[edit]
- Andrews, Richard (2011). Re-Framing Literacy: Teaching and Learning in English and the Language Arts. Language, Culture, and Teaching 6. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780415995528.
- Brandon, James R., ed. (1992). Kabuki: Five Classic Plays. UNESCO collection of representative works. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 9780824814267.
- Charlton, David (1986). Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-comique. Cambridge opera handbooks. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521251297.
- Dessen, Alan C. (2002). Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521007986.
- Goodridge, Janet (1999). Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama, Dance and Ceremony. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ISBN 9781853025488.
- Holland, Peter (1997). English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521564762.
- Pavis, Patrice; Shantz, Christine (1998). "INTERMISSION". Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802081636.
See also[edit]
