Visit our bar: the unexpected return of the intermission in the cinema

It is the frozen image that floods the networks, the irrefutable proof that one has seen the film. It is also the most unexpected return of the season: the intermission at the cinema. On screen, a black and white photo of the wedding of László Tóth, the architect who is the protagonist of The Brutalist , which this Sunday competes for 10 Oscar awards. A clock starts the countdown: 15 minutes to stretch your legs, go to the bathroom or have a coffee. Those who decide to stay, enjoy a musical piece by John Tilbury, which provides a moment of solace halfway through Brady Corbet 's monumental film, three hours and 35 minutes long. Without this respite, it would be a marathon of violence and suffering. With this brief break, you get to the end without losing your composure.

This off-the-cuff use of the intermission has sparked enthusiastic voices calling for its return to cinema, while others dismiss its necessity or denounce the delusions of grandeur of Corbet’s film. “From the first draft, the film was conceived with an intermission. It was not an afterthought, but an essential part of the film’s structure,” argues The Brutalist producer DJ Gugenheim from Los Angeles. “The intermission immediately evoked the classic cinematic experiences of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago , where intermissions were not just convenient pauses, but vital elements of the narrative. Those films unfolded in two acts, allowing the audience to absorb the weight of the first half before immersing themselves in the emotional and narrative twists of the second. I love that The Brutalist embraces that tradition,” he adds.

However marginal their return may be, he sees the reappearance of intermissions as a good sign. “In this age of instant consumption, they reinforce the idea of ​​immersion: they remind us that a film is an event, something to be fully experienced and not just passively consumed,” says the producer of The Brutalist . “These are films that demand patience and, in return, offer a richer, more rewarding experience.”

Until recently, intermissions were inseparable from the seventh art. Inherited from 17th-century European theatre, which rescued the division into acts from Rome (unlike the Greeks, who favoured total immersion), they were the norm between the 1930s and the end of the 1970s. Cinemas adopted them out of technical necessity – the change of reels – but they also knew how to take advantage of them commercially. They disappeared due to technological advances, but they are re-emerging at a time when films are becoming longer: according to data from the IMDb website, in the last three decades their average length has gone from 100 to 120 minutes .

The Brutalist is not the first film to resurrect them. Quentin Tarantino proposed two different cuts for his film The Hateful Eight (2015), one of which included a 12-minute break. In 2021, Zack Snyder did the same with his version of Justice League , which lasted four hours. More recently, Wicked was on the verge of following the same path: one of its producers, Marc Platt, tried, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a single film divided by an intermission, as happened in the original musical.

The new auteur cinema has not been immune to them either. The record is held by the Argentine Mariano Llinás with La flor (2018), one of the longest films in the history of cinema, with its 14 hours of duration, interrupted by three intermissions. “In such cases, it is vital that the spectator’s attention remains fresh, and that tends not to happen after two and a half hours,” confesses the director from Buenos Aires. “The intermission has the virtue of renewing the will to return to the theatre. Once certain physiological rituals have been overcome, the spectator can see that his urgency to leave was futile, and that there is no better place than inside the cinema.”

“After the intermission, the spectator realizes that his urgency to leave the room was futile, and that there is no better place than inside the cinema,” says Mariano Llinás, director of a 14-hour film.

In Spanish cinema, Jonás Trueba rescued the intermission in his documentary Quién lo imposible (2021), which lasts three hours and 45 minutes, separated by two intermissions. “I love the experience of intermissions. You can comment on the play and it forces the viewer to go in and out, not just physically, of what they are watching. It is a risk and that is why I like it,” says the director. At the premiere of the film in San Sebastián, many took the opportunity to go to the bathroom. “But others stayed in the room commenting or dancing, because we played music, and it was almost my favorite moment of the film. It seemed to me that it generated community among the spectators. It made the physical experience of cinema more evident.” Even so, they do not always seem necessary to him. The one in The Brutalist , for example, did not convince him: “The film reaches a very obvious peak in the intermission, but then it seems that everything it has promised turns against it. It is deceitful, but also somewhat deceitful.”

Several directors accustomed to long durations prefer to dispense with the intermission. James Cameron, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve are leading this position. In the United Kingdom, where the Vue channel has been trying to reintroduce them for years to alleviate the attention deficit of younger viewers - with 80% of positive opinions according to an experiment from 2023 - some cinemas tried to introduce an intermission in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Moon . Its distributor demanded its withdrawal. “People watch five hours of television or three-and-a-half-hour plays. Give the same respect to cinema,” Scorsese demanded.

On the festival circuit, filmmakers like Lav Diaz and Frederick Wiseman also reject breaks they consider unnecessary. “I don’t believe in or use intermissions. There’s a risk that the audience will lose the continuity of the film. Not using them has never been a problem in getting my films across,” Wiseman says in an email. Todd Solondz , who included an intermission for comic relief in Wiener-Dog (2016), is also not enthusiastic. “They only serve to make the audience skip the second half without bothering anyone,” he quips from New York.

In Spain, distributors are not unanimous: a general return of the intermission would complicate programming and force sessions to be reduced. “Unless it is planned in the story, interrupting can go against the director’s intention, like commercial breaks on television,” says Paz Recolons, director of the Verdi cinemas, who is in favour of limiting them to essential cases. “Sometimes it is a nightmare for the spectator to watch durations of more than two hours. And for the cinema it is an opportunity to provide a better service and perhaps earn some income, as that classic message from Visit our bar indicated.” In reality, this pause never disappeared completely: it is still in force in India, where the intermission is still obligatory (the film RRR , three hours and seven minutes long , gave them a nod in 2022), the countries of the Middle East or some cities in Italy.

In the collective imagination, the intermission is still associated with the epic scale that The Brutalist tries to emulate. “In particular, that they spoke of the founding of a new homeland,” says Jordi Balló , a leading figure in film analysis and co-author of the recent essay The Incessant Image (Anagrama), on audiovisual formats. The list is endless: The Birth of a Nation, The Ten Commandments, The Conquest of the West, King of Kings, Once Upon a Time in America, Novecento, The Godfather … “They are stories in which there is time for illusion and disappointment. The intermission marks a caesura between the two. By resurrecting the intermission, Corbet is telling us that his film is, like those old titles, larger than life. But, at the same time, he vindicates the immersive nature of cinema, a very current need to return to the theatre as a key element for the life of a film,” says Balló. “It may seem like a retro gesture, but it is rigorously contemporary.”