Bob: At Somerset House (From Worcester News)

Bob: At Somerset House

5:30pm Friday 19th September 2008 in

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I’ve never liked crowds. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic. I just hear “crowd” and I picture grey-faced suits stacked up on escalators closer than dominoes. Or I feel the crushing collective narrow-mindedness of a Nazi rally. And there’s something so sycophantic about a throng of gig-goers gyrating at the feet of some short-burning star, something so obsequious even about fans at a public lecture gushing as they line up to get their hardbacks John-Hancocked by the latest, greatest celebrity intellectual.

For something like the same reason (is it loss of self-identity?) I’ve always preferred a house party to a club. In a nightclub - dark, noisy and crowded - I think to myself, “We can’t even talk properly in here! There’s just one less way for us all to get to know each other.” (I’m a square, I know that, I’m comfortable with it.)

But I’m not a complete damp squib. I do get the crowd thing. At a protest or a rally or any large meeting of minds, most people can get this sense of power and belonging from being part of something that everyone agrees with, if only for a moment. Or at a gig or a festival, when it's not usually about any message and you’re just there for the enjoyment of the music, still the vibe doesn’t come from just one person, it’s reflected and sustained by everyone in the crowd who loves that band.

But this is still all about power, or belonging, or fandom or agreement. I was in a crowd this summer which, for me anyway, somehow stepped outside of all that.

Essentially, this crowd was just a big bunch of people watching a movie. But not just any movie, oh noes. It was an outdoor showing at Somerset House off the Strand. 2,000 people all sat on the ground in the courtyard, amid 18th century neoclassical architecture, looking up from their cushions to a giant screen. 2,000 random folk were there to watch the Kelly-Donen 1952 classic, Singin’ in the Rain.

It was a sponsored event, but the marketing guy didn’t spend too long bigging up Film4 before the show. Instead he introduced two special guests: Gene Kelly’s wife and daughter. Mother and daughter stood before the 2,000 and said how proud they were of Gene and how pleased they were to see so many people come out to see the film. It can’t be often that Gene Kelly's family sees a crowd like this turn out for Singin’ in the Rain anymore, if ever, especially outdoors on a London night when it really did look very much like it was going to rain! I think the family presence lent the screening almost an historic atmosphere. People normally frown in a British cinema if anyone so much as claps at the credits, but before long this crowd was clapping at every dance routine and laughing at every joke.

As much as anything else, Singin’ in the Rain is (I now know) just an amazing film. The humour is mostly lovable and even the occasional stylistic anachronism in the comedy is funny anyway. It’s one of those films that is so much better for being bigger, not because of sweeping special effects!, but for the long takes of incredible acrobatic dancing; hard-won skills so rarely exhibited on the big screen now. Singin’ depicts a film industry which was itself old-fashioned even when the film was made (the plot revolves around the transition from silent film to talkies, this was a quarter century after The Jazz Singer). But there is something very nearly "post-modern" about the knowing self-reference, and hell it’s just funny to watch an old film about old films. The lovers have the kind of classical sexual chemistry that is so subtle and heavily disguised that it's completely innocent and just so easy to empathise with. Even at the denouement, the eventual disgrace of Lina Lamont (the baddie) is so well-deserved, so predictably plotted, and you are so aware of her as an actress playing a part, that there is no scope for a nasty taste in the mouth.

The friends I was with all said they felt the same glow from being in that crowd. I said “I’m sure that’s just about the best feeling you could get from watching a film.” They agreed. I just did a quick google now and someone called wasthisme.blogspot.com agrees as well: "Quite how good this was can't be expressed in bloggage - watching Singin' In The Rain in the open air at Somerset House. Perfect summer evening, lying on a picnic blanket with the Kiwi [sic], watching one of the most heartwarming films around."

Here’s the thing. It might sound counter-intuitive, but I think what did it for me was the fact that all that shared enjoyment had so little focus. Unlike a rally or a protest, a lecture or a sermon, there was no propositional content that the crowd had to agree with, no message to promote. Even unlike a gig or a festival – though I’m sure there were a few avid Gene Kelly groupies in the crowd – most of the mixed but generally youthful audience probably had little in the way of pre-existing fandom for the movie as such (I had to look up that stuff about it being a Kelly-Donen 1952 classic, you know!). In other words, the crowd was mostly made up of people who were just open-minded enough to give something a bit different a go. Maybe there are feelings we can get by discovering something together in a crowd that we can't get merely by agreeing with each other before we even arrive at the event.

Anyway, I know we’re all supposed to hate each other now and it’s not particularly cool to effuse about strangers, but I think some very basic human feelings kept us warm at Somerset House.