Not-so great outdoors... A Summer Screen showing from 2005. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty
The forthcoming Summer Screen film season boasts surround sound and a "state-of-the-art" giant screen. It features a range of great pictures, from Rear Window to Rushmore to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, while its imposing Somerset House address is slap-bang in the centre of London. You might say that Summer Screen is the summer film season that has everything. Everything, that is, except a roof.
No doubt the event organisers regard this as their USP. But I've always felt that films (like newborn babies or endangered livestock) should be kept indoors. Movies, for better or worse, are not stage plays, or concerts, or stand-up comics; those hardy troupers of the showbiz circuit. A better comparison might be with the fragile art of the stage magician or the spiritualist. (In France, significantly, they are not called screenings but "séances".)
Ideally, a film requires total darkness (and even total hush) to cast its spell. Failing that, a dimly lit living room is the next best thing. Expose it to the elements and the thrill is gone.
Don't get me wrong. I like the outside world. I like walking in it and swimming in it and working in it and reading in it. I just don't like watching films in it, because it seems antithetical to the whole moviegoing experience. In fact, barring underwater cinemas (dive-ins?), I can't think of a worse showcase for a good motion picture.
Events such as Summer Screen or last year's Stella Artois festival take their lead from the drive-in scene that catered to the burgeoning youth market of 1950s America. Ergo, we are told they are a great way of turning a younger audience on to old or cult films that they might otherwise never get the chance to see. I'm sure the event organisers genuinely believe this to be the case. In practice, though, I wonder if it works out that way.
My own suspicion is that the audience at an open air screening probably splits about 50/50 between those who have seen the movie before and would like to see it again, and those who haven't and simply want an excuse to sit outside on a summer evening and sink a few beers with their mates. The first group finds their enjoyment of the film marred by the chatter and fidgeting of the other group. The other group finds their enjoyment of their friends marred by the chatter and flicker of the film. In the end, neither side is well-served by the open-air experience.
OK, I repeat: this is only a suspicion. I should also stress at this point that I have never actually attended any of the UK's recent events. Nor, to my shame, have I ever been to a drive-in - and not just because I was grounded and Bessie-Mae preferred to go with Biff. So it is entirely feasible that open air film screenings provide a great night out for both pallid cineastes and al-fresco party animals alike. Yet somehow I doubt it.
Each year the organisers of the Cannes film festival hold a series of public screenings on the beach beside the Palais. This is called the Cinema de la Plage and serves as an antidote to all the snooty, red carpet affairs taking place next door. If you're wanting to visit a beach, you could do a lot worse than the Cinema de la Plage. If you're wanting to see a movie, you could conceivably also do worse. But not by very much.
On the night that I visited, the Cinema de la Plage was showing Bullitt. The few punters who stayed the course sat in their deckchairs with blankets pulled up to their chins. Most wandered in for a bit and then wandered off again, rubbing sand from their eyes as they went.
On screen, Steve McQueen was a wash of pale watercolours and the sound quality was such that I could barely hear what he was saying. When the wind got up the picture began billowing like a sail. Every now and then the spotlight from a nearby yacht would come strobing across the beam of the projector and obliterate it entirely.
So that, in a nutshell, was my Bullitt on the beach; my great open-air spectacular. I left with the distinct impression that something was missing. That something, I later realised, was a roof.
