Village Film Night Descends Into Schism After Projector Declared "Too Wide"

The monthly moving-picture evening at the Wilberforce Memorial Rooms in Haddenham has split into two irreconcilable congregations, following a dispute over the width of a rectangle.

The trouble began in the spring, when the committee replaced its beloved projector with a newer unit capable of what the manufacturer's leaflet described as "an enhanced horizontal experience". Within four minutes of its first screening, a faction of eleven regulars had walked to the far end of the hall, erected a bedsheet on two coat stands, and begun showing the same film on a smaller, squarer, morally superior surface.

"We are not separatists," said the leader of the bedsheet faction, a retired quantity surveyor who asked to be described only as a man who knows what an aspect ratio is. "We simply believe that if a film was made for a shape, it should be shown in that shape. What they have down at the other end is not cinema. It is a landscape painting with people talking in it."

The Committee for the Preservation of the Correct Rectangle, a three-person body formed in the interval of a Tuesday, has since issued a fourteen-page position paper. Its findings state that 71 per cent of Haddenham residents cannot tell the difference between widescreen and being slightly further away, a figure the Committee arrived at by asking six people outside Bloomin' Fruity, two of whom had come out for potatoes and left immediately.

The main faction, operating from the original wall, remains defiant. "They can have their little sheet," said the volunteer in charge of the kettle, who is also in charge of the lights, the raffle and, since August, the constitution. "We have a screen, a proper blackout curtain, and the good biscuits. They have a bedsheet with a faint cartoon dinosaur on it, and they have the nerve to lecture us about immersion."

Relations deteriorated further when both factions unknowingly booked the same title for the same evening. For two hours and nine minutes the hall played the film twice, out of sync by roughly forty seconds, meaning every emotional revelation landed, then landed again, to groans from the far end. One attendee described the effect as "very moving, in the way that being in two rooms at once is moving".

An approach from Thame, offering to mediate, was rejected by both sides on the grounds that Thame once showed a film in black and white "as a stunt". Talks are now being conducted through the hall's noticeboard, where a laminated notice reading PLEASE RESPECT THE SHAPE has been answered by a second laminated notice reading THE SHAPE IS A CONSTRUCT, itself answered by a third notice, unlaminated, simply asking whether anyone has seen a thermos.

Attempts to hold peace talks on neutral ground collapsed when the only neutral ground anyone could agree on was Norsk, which was shut, as it was also shut on the two subsequent occasions, and a brownie there costs four pounds, which the bedsheet faction described as "another rectangle we are being overcharged for".

The Herald put it to both factions that they could, conceivably, sit together and watch one film. The question was met with a silence of such depth that we are honouring it by printing it in full. Both sides did agree on one point, which is that more people should come, because a schism with an audience of nine is technically just a disagreement.

So go. Haddenham Village Film Night runs monthly at the village hall, doors from 7pm for a 7.30pm start, tickets on the door with tea, biscuits and a raffle included in the usual modest price, and everyone in the village is welcome whatever shape they prefer their rectangles. Take a seat at whichever end you like, and if somebody hands you a bedsheet, be kind about it.