TY - JOUR
AU - Rogers,, Ariel
AB - With the proliferation of personal computers, mobile phones and similar devices over the past several decades, screens and the dispositifs associated with them appear to have transformed dramatically. Contemporary viewing arrangements featuring a profusion of small, light-emitting, mobile screens seem in particular to have deviated from a configuration of theatrical cinema that coalesced early in the twentieth century and centred around a single, large, reflective screen in a darkened auditorium.1 Often considered the dominant mode of presenting moving images, at least until the popularization of television in the 1950s, this conception of theatrical exhibition, together with the purported representational unity of ‘classical’ cinema, fuelled 1970s apparatus theory’s claims about the centring and fixation of the spectator.2 With the contemporary multiplicity of both screens and frames within screens, the dispositifs of ‘new’ digital media, by contrast, have been associated with fragmentation, decentring and distraction.3 Attention to historical screen practices, however, challenges this view of twentieth-century theatrical cinema and reframes its relation to contemporary screens. In the rash of scholarship on ‘new’ digital media that appeared in the 1990s and early 2000s, the perceived pervasiveness of screens contributed to the notion that people were becoming immersed in the dematerialized, fabricated realm of ‘cyberspace’.4 Since that time, as screens have continued to multiply, scholars have combatted the sense of rupture previously attributed to the notion of virtuality by emphasizing the role the user’s body plays in the experience of digital media5 and highlighting the materiality of screens themselves.6 In conjunction with that effort, a growing body of historical work has also made it clear that the concepts and attributes often associated with the new screens – from virtuality7 and immersion8 to mobility,9 multiplicity,10 and a small scale11 – have long-standing precedents. Such attention to the historical diversity of screen practices has revealed that the cinematic apparatus, as both technological and psychosocial arrangement, has long been, in Haidee Wasson’s words, ‘multiply articulated’ both diachronically and synchronically.12 Indeed, work in film and art history has elucidated the heterogeneity of cinema’s dispositifs by showing how screen practices in areas such as early cinema, useful cinema, and the historical avant garde diverged from, or repurposed elements of, the theatrical exhibition of Hollywood cinema in the classical era.13 This essay (and the book project from which it derives) builds on that work by examining screen practices in, and in conjunction with, Hollywood in and around the 1930s – the period that saw the consolidation of the modes of filmmaking and exhibition that would be critiqued by apparatus theory, and against which previous, concurrent and subsequent divergences are often measured. Inspired by the ongoing effort to treat cinema’s digital turn as what Thomas Elsaesser describes as a ‘reflexive turn in thinking about cinema’, I thus propose harnessing the sense of upheaval now associated with screens by employing the screen itself as a matrix through which to reconsider Hollywood cinema and its dispositifs within the historical context in which they adopted their most hegemonic form.14 What renders something a screen, as Francesco Casetti argues, is not a specific material quality but rather its role within a certain type of assemblage.15 Broadly speaking, the objects and formations deemed screens – including audiovisual screens as well as windscreens, window screens, folding screens, fire screens and smokescreens – provide the means for sheltering, concealing, filtering, partitioning or revealing; in other words, screens work to organize spaces, as demonstrated by theorists such as Casetti, Anne Friedberg, and Giuliana Bruno.16 The spaces that audiovisual screens organize are unique in that they are composed of both actual and virtual realms. It should be emphasized, however, that even film screens do not simply reveal virtual views, but also, and often simultaneously, work to shelter, conceal, filter and partition actual and virtual spaces. Indeed, these functions underlie film theory’s long-standing conceptualization of these objects not only as windows but as thresholds, barriers, masks, frames and mirrors.17 Examining film history through the lens of screen technologies thus reveals connections among various objects, configurations and practices that are nevertheless united in their application to the mediation of actual and virtual domains. Exploring how film screens accomplished such mediation in and around the 1930s illuminates relationships among areas of film practice that are usually analysed in isolation, such as production and exhibition, and enables a perspective across what are often considered divergent modes of cinema, including the mainstream and the avant garde. In mapping the ways in which screen technologies bridged such areas, it is possible to chart how a crucial component of the cinematic apparatus participated in diverse but overlapping sets of discourses and practices. Doing so reveals the fluidity and porousness of that apparatus, even in the context of Hollywood cinema at the height of the classical era. And it thereby presents the heterogeneity and openness of cinema’s dispositifs as a pervasive and persistent part of film history rather than a product of Hollywood’s others or an outcome of digital technologies. In addition to providing an expanded view of cinema’s historical dispositifs, attention to the use of screen technologies in the classical era also offers new ways to think about and deploy the concept of the cinematic dispositif itself. For Jean-Louis Baudry and other film theorists drawing on his ideas, this concept facilitated mapping connections among cinema’s technological, psychic and social arrangements and among its material configurations, textual operations and spectatorial address.18 Despite apparatus theory’s portrayal of a fairly monolithic and static cinematic machine and spectator, the concept of dispositif can serve as a methodological tool for parsing their variability. Noting the way in which English translations of key works of apparatus theory, including Baudry’s 1975 essay, used the word apparatus to encompass and thereby conflate the French terms dispositif and appareil, subsequent scholarship has worked to disambiguate the notion of appareil, which refers to the more literal significance of apparatus as a kind of machine, and that of dispositif, which suggests the more abstract concept of an arrangement.19 In connection with that effort – and informed by historical work on early cinema, as well as reconsiderations of Michel Foucault’s notion of dispositif by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben – scholars including Frank Kessler, Thomas Elsaesser and Francesco Casetti have, from both historical and theoretical perspectives, emphasized the multiplicity and dynamism of cinematic (and, more broadly, mediatic) dispositifs as both technological and spectatorial arrangements.20 As their work suggests, this conception of dispositif (as opposed to the more rigid notion of apparatus as machine) can provide a means to reassess media and mediated experiences as simultaneously protean and historically situated. The concept of dispositif in particular can supply a model for parsing flexible connections among the heterogeneous components of cinema, offering a way of mapping the shifting relationships between production and exhibition and across representation, technology and culture, thus also offering a framework for linking cinema with other mediatic and cultural configurations. Examining such relationships through an exploration of classical-era screen practices challenges the tendency to conceptualize and distinguish among mediatic dispositifs, both historical and contemporary, by virtue of screens’ material qualities. Whereas qualities such as large/small, static/mobile, single/multiple or light reflecting/light emitting have often been employed to differentiate classical-era theatrical cinema from historical and contemporary alternatives, the work undertaken here shows that qualities usually considered alternative – especially multiplicity, light emission and a small scale – were long components of even mainstream screen practice. Indeed my research reveals the significant role that multiple screens of varying size and material construction played in shaping the dispositif of theatrical Hollywood cinema in and around the 1930s. This suggests an expanded historical genealogy for multiscreen media, moving beyond the context of the avant garde with which it has been more often associated. Recognizing the pervasiveness and persistence of such multiplicity, however, also illuminates different means of conceptualizing and, concomitantly, historicizing cinema’s dispositifs. Specifically it indicates how these dispositifs can be conceived and historicized in terms of particular spatiotemporal logics (together with attendant social logics), which can span configurations featuring diverse screens. Taking up Elsaesser’s suggestion that we reassess cinema’s dispositifs by mapping variable conjunctions of space/place, time/duration and agency/subject, this exploration of historical screen practices thus reveals how such conjunctions operate across various technological and institutional arrangements.21 In doing so, moreover, it shows how screens function as dynamic apparatuses in their own right, giving rise to arrangements that themselves come into variable relation with other components of audiovisual media and their contexts. This essay traces a particular spatiotemporal logic across the realms of production and theatrical exhibition, arguing that a historically rooted emphasis on spatial synthesis and temporal synchronization traversed and united otherwise diverse screen practices in the USA in and around the 1930s. In that context, practitioners worked to layer and array a range of screens (from the largest to the smallest) within and across different sites (such as sound stages and movie theatres), marshalling various virtual and actual domains into new synthetic spaces. In the realm of production, this period saw Hollywood adopt the special-effects technique of rear projection, which employed screens to combine previously filmed background imagery with action shot in the studio. While editing is usually considered the most significant means by which the classical Hollywood cinema organized filmed fragments into new spaces, compositing techniques such as rear projection performed an analogous function within the shot itself, joining ontologically distinct elements, shot at different times and places, within the frame.22 Exhibition screens extended this logic of spatial synthesis to the viewer’s material environment and, in doing so, reduplicated it. In the realm of theatrical exhibition, the 1930s witnessed an effort to integrate onscreen images more fully with their physical surroundings. Throughout the decade, architects and engineers outlined several methods for achieving such integration, mobilizing components of screen and theatre design such as the size, masking and brightness of the screen as well as the lighting, decoration and material construction of the auditorium. Such practices, in different ways, formed theatrical spaces that were, in the architect Benjamin Schlanger’s words, ‘tuned to’ or even ‘synchronized with’ the screen presentation itself.23 In doing so they also yielded new spatial syntheses, which reflected and extended the form of composite space that was, by virtue of special-effects techniques such as rear projection, increasingly evident onscreen. As Schlanger’s reference to the synchronization of theatre and image space attests, a historically contingent approach to the construction of time also contributed to this effort at spatial synthesis. A range of disparate screen practices – including the use of special-effects screens, large auditorium screens and multiple auditorium screens – shared an emphasis on synchronizing the screen image with other components of the apparatus. Through such practices, screen images were synchronized not only with recorded sounds but also with cameras, screen borders and other projections. The pervasive interest in synchronization was certainly rooted in discourses on electricity and capitalized on the technology and popularity of synchronized sound; but beyond this the persistent emphasis on synchronicity joined a variety of screen technologies with sound technologies in employing a particular, and particularly modern, form of temporality to structure new mediated spaces. Recognizing the role that spatial synthesis and temporal synchronization played in the theatrical exhibition of classical-era Hollywood cinema challenges the suggestion, put forth most prominently by Lev Manovich, that the current pervasiveness of compositing (together with animation) distinguishes contemporary images from the mainstream cinema of the twentieth century and links the new images instead with the products of the historical avant garde.24 Contrary to Manovich’s assertion that compositing was marginalized in the classical era, a focus on historical screen practices reveals its pervasiveness in both representation and exhibition.25 When people went to the movie theatre to view Hollywood films in the 1930s, they entered a cinematic space structured through the spatiotemporal synthesis of multiple filmed fragments. Insofar as screens were harnessed to combine such fragments into new composites, both onscreen and in the theatre, the use of these objects endowed cinematic space, even as shaped by Hollywood cinema, with the forms of multi-perspectivality and simultaneity associated with concurrent practices in modern art and architecture, which themselves reflected the social and sensorial changes arising with urban-industrial modernity, including the rise of cinema.26 Screen practices of the 1930s, in short, contributed to what Miriam Hansen termed the ‘vernacular modernism’ of the so-called classical Hollywood cinema, providing its mass audience with an aesthetic experience that both reflected and contributed to the perceptual transformations attendant to the new configurations of space and time (if not always the forms of shock) associated with modernity.27 An examination of screen practices in and around the 1930s shows the historical consolidation of material strategies for achieving the representational unity and spectatorial centring that apparatus theorists of the 1970s, and many others since, have attributed to the theatrical exhibition of Hollywood cinema in the classical era. But it also reveals that the dispositif associated with these forms of representation and address was neither exclusive nor hermetic; it was instead fluidly related to configurations that facilitated the type of fragmentation and decentring usually attributed to contemporary media and the historical avant garde. The pervasive emphasis on spatial synthesis and temporal synchronization in the 1930s transcended distinctions such as unity/fragmentation and centring/decentring. In doing so, these spatiotemporal formations endowed diverse screen practices with broadly shared but historically contingent contours. In embracing rear projection as a special-effects technique in the early 1930s, the Hollywood studios rendered screens a key component of film production. This technique installed translucent screens on the set,28 and previously photographed imagery, either static or moving, was projected from behind the screen while actors performed in front of it, so that the on-set camera could film both the live performance and the projected background at once.29 The practice had precedents predating cinema itself (it was already employed in the Phantasmagoria and to insert backgrounds in portrait photography), and it was used in the movies as early as 1913.30 Hollywood, however, adopted rear projection between 1930 and 1932, when the coming of synchronized sound had made location shooting impractical, the deepening Depression favoured the technique’s economy, and several technological developments made it newly feasible.31 Rear projection was widely employed throughout the 1930s and beyond, allowing actors safely and economically ensconced in the studio to pretend to be driving cars, riding trains, sailing ships, flying aeroplanes, confronting fires or touring exotic locations. It thus structured the creation of countless films, from fantastic spectacles to the most quotidian Hollywood fare, around screens. Although most theorizations of screens emphasize their role in exhibition, the screens used in production work in similar ways to mediate virtual and actual spaces. Indeed the rear-projection screens employed in the classical era encouraged production spaces to exist simultaneously as exhibition spaces. Displaying pre-filmed imagery as an extension, or even replacement, of a physical set, rear-projection screens connected pre-filmed and live-action spaces on the sound stage to form diegeses constituted from ontologically distinct domains.32 The use of screens on the set shaped diegetic space in ways that functioned in tandem with exhibition screens. Insofar as rear-projection screens often constituted the background within a shot, they contributed to a stacking of image planes within cinematic space, endowing that space with what Dominique Païni describes as a ‘layered effect’.33 At least one technician went so far as to advocate nesting rear-projected images within rear-projected images, raising the prospect of a mise-en-abyme of screened images receding into the depth of the diegesis.34 Following Anne Friedberg in taking cinematic space to encompass the built and represented realms mediated by the screen – contributing to what Thomas Elsaesser identifies as an ‘expanded concept of diegesis’ – we can see that the theatrical screen itself also contributed to this layering.35 Viewers in the theatre, in other words, confronted a series of screens, including the exhibition screen in the actual foreground and, within and beyond it, the rear-projection screen(s) in the projected background. In many cases, special-effects practice also entailed the arraying of multiple rear-projection screens laterally, so that they enacted a kind of spatial montage. As I will elaborate, this practice too found an echo in exhibition with the arraying of screens and screening surfaces in the theatre. In its emphasis on spatial layering, rear projection worked in concert with several other techniques and technologies of filmmaking. David Bordwell identifies the stacking of planes as a key strategy in classical Hollywood cinema’s effort to efface the two-dimensional surface of the theatrical screen by representing three-dimensional space. In this case, lighting, focus, costuming and set design are taken to work together to distinguish figures in the foreground from separate background planes within the mise-en-scene.36 In the 1930s such spatial layering also played a role in animation practice (culminating with the development of the multiplane camera), stereoscopic 3D (especially in the wake of MGM’s 1936 release of Audioscopiks [Jacob Leventhal and John Norling]), and the reemergence of deep-focus cinematography.37 The employment of layering within film sound, however, offers an especially apt analogue to, and conspirator with, rear projection. As James Lastra has shown, this period witnessed a transformation in the way Hollywood engineers conceived the spatiality of diegetic sound, as they began to employ dubbing and re-recording to construct hierarchically layered soundtracks.38 At the same time as sound engineers were compiling heterogeneous sonic fragments into foreground and background layers on the soundtrack, special-effects technicians were employing rear-projection screens to create similarly layered spaces within the shot. In both cases the resulting composites could read as homogeneous entities; yet even the most unified visual and sonic spaces thus constructed were nevertheless deeply synthetic. Underlying the application of rear-projection screens to such layering was the way in which the surface of the screen could function alternately, and even simultaneously, as an aperture and a barrier, a vehicle of both transparency and opacity. The actual permeability of rear-projection screens was crucial to their construction and use in the 1930s and served as a foundation for their representational functions. A major concern for the technicians designing and building these screens was to increase the surfaces’ capacity to transmit light without thereby sacrificing the diffusive quality that guarded the uniformity of the projected images. Technicians pursued that balance through experimentation with screen-construction materials, which ranged from the glass panes used at the outset of the decade to cellulose sheets and gelatin-infused silk.39 The quality of transparency shared by glass, cellulose and silk rear-projection screens emphasized the surfaces’ capacity to join and/or separate the spaces they bisected by conducting and/or obstructing light – their capacity, in other words, to act as permeable membranes mediating the spaces in front of and behind them. Rear-projection screens enacted such mediation in a dual fashion. Within the actual space of the set, these screens mediated the realm of performance, which took place in front of the screen surface, and the domain of the projection apparatus positioned behind that surface. In this sense the screens took on a filtering function, allowing light to pass through from the projector but obscuring the camera’s view of the projector itself. At the same time practitioners in Hollywood developed rear-projection screens to provide an aperture to represented space, rendering them what Friedberg terms ‘virtual windows’.40 The practice of using these screens to supply views out of windows within the set underscores – and served to naturalize – that function. In its application to spatial layering, rear projection echoed the practice of glass painting, a long-standing special-effects technique popular into the early 1930s. This technique involved a partially painted sheet of glass being situated between the camera and the performance space on the set. The camera would capture both the painted image and the action unfolding behind the transparent portion of the glass.41 Hence glass painting, like rear projection, facilitated the creation of composite imagery at the time of shooting by positioning a sheet of glass within the set. Whereas rear-projection practice positioned the glass (or, later, cellulose or silk) surface in the background, glass paintings were positioned in the foreground on the set while often functioning as background within the diegesis. In both cases, though, the combination of live action with imagery gracing the glass surface, whether painted or projected, endowed the composite image with a layered spatiality. And in both cases the glass sheet itself demarcated foreground and background by serving simultaneously as an image plane and as the opening to a view beyond the surface, whether revealing the actual set (as in glass painting) or a virtual environment (as in rear projection). These special-effects techniques can thus be seen as part of the larger focus on transparency within a range of modernist practices, from modern architecture to cubist painting, where transparency serves, among other roles, as a literal and figurative vehicle for spatiotemporal reorganization and for the intersection of virtual and actual presence.42 King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), one of the most well-known instances of Hollywood’s use of special effects in the sound era, exemplifies how the form of spatial layering associated with rear projection could contribute to a film’s mode of representation and address. With the pervasive presence of the sheets of glass, cellulose and stretched rubber employed to combine animated monsters with live actors (via glass painting, full-scale rear projection, and miniature rear projection respectively), King Kong’s diegetic space is constituted from a series of stacked planes.43 Echoing the construction of the soundtrack, which employs Max Steiner’s score as background music, this spatial formation exemplifies and furthers the layering accomplished by rear projection itself.44 The stacking of image planes not only unites monsters and humans within the frame, but also consigns them to what Noël Carroll identifies as different ‘zones’, located at different depths, within the represented world.45 In doing so, it supports a form of representation in which meaning is conveyed through the separation and transgression of image planes. While the surfaces of the rear-projection screens act as ontological barriers between the zones, the film conveys the monsters’ threat to the humans, as in the famous scene where Kong undresses Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), by suggesting that these barriers could be breached (figure 1).46 This spatial formation contributes to the film’s politics of representation – particularly the construction and containment of Kong’s threat, figured as the threat of miscegenation – by rendering the prospect that monsters and humans may touch as simultaneously thrilling and impossible.47 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Miniature rear projection was used to composite the model of Kong with the live actress in King Kong (RKO, 1933). Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Miniature rear projection was used to composite the model of Kong with the live actress in King Kong (RKO, 1933). Recognizing that the exhibition screen constitutes another layer in the series of stacked planes further illuminates King Kong’s address. If the film revolves around the threat that dangerous figures could transgress the rear-projection screen and harm the characters on the other side, it simultaneously introduces the prospect that these figures could cross the ontological divide also marked by the theatrical screen, at a felt, if not actual, peril to the film’s audience. And if rear-projection screens worked to mould diegetic space to the dimensions of ideology, creating separations and unions formulating racial difference as a threat, their mirroring in the theatrical screen extended that ideological organization of space to viewers’ actual environment. James Snead has argued that King Kong implicates its own viewers in the ‘optical colonialism’ perpetrated by the characters, a form of voyeurism that links seeing to capturing and killing.48 Since the rear-projection screens employed in King Kong bridged the spaces they demarcated through the prospect of physical (sexual and/or violent) contact across a permeable surface, attention to this special-effects practice suggests that the film’s ideological project – conveyed through the dual address to spectators within and of the film – extended beyond the realm of vision and into that of touch. In having Kong threaten to transgress the rear-projection screen and come into tactile contact with the various audiences assembled to ogle him within the fictional world (transgressions that, the film suggests, justify the countervailing breaches represented by Kong’s capture and execution), the film also extended the creature’s ideologically rooted threat to its own viewers by proffering the sensation that the creature could reach across the barrier of the theatrical screen as well.49 The film’s use of rear projection thus supports Paul Young’s claim that Kong served as a figure for the transgression of boundaries in the radio age.50King Kong, in short, harnessed rear-projection screens to structure its address, as well as its diegesis, around cultural fears of spatial and social border crossing, endowing the prospect of contact across an ontological and, allegorically, racial divide with a sense of titillation and terror. Numerous other films of the period also applied rear projection to the segregation and threatened transgression of foreground and background planes, often to similar ideological ends.51 In particular, Westerns such as The Plainsman (Cecil B. DeMille, 1936), Geronimo (Paul Sloane, 1939), Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) and Union Pacific (Cecil B. DeMille, 1939) employed rear projection to separate the European American protagonists in the foreground from groups of attacking Native American warriors occupying background landscapes, while also foregrounding the threat that the warriors’ bullets or arrows could penetrate into the foreground. In addition to synthesizing multiple spatial domains through the layering of image planes, rear-projection practices achieved such synthesis by arraying rear-projected images laterally. In this regard these practices harnessed the screen’s function not only as a membrane structuring the spaces in front of and behind it but also as a frame organizing the spaces within and surrounding it. Much of this work occurred as part of the effort, which consumed technicians throughout the 1930s and beyond, to increase the size of the rear-projected image. At the outset of the decade, the process was limited to relatively small screens of around six or eight feet wide, which in turn posed limitations on the camera distances possible for rear-projection shots.52 Often rear projection was consigned to a small portion of the image such as the view from a window, but if the projected image was to constitute the background fully, actors had to be photographed at fairly close range. By 1932 the studios were employing glass screens of up to eighteen or twenty feet wide, and the new cellulose surfaces reached to twenty-three feet wide.53 Further attempts to increase the scale of rear-projected images entailed multiplying the projectors, whether to juxtapose their beams (filling multiple adjacent screens), superimpose their beams (creating a brighter background on a larger screen), or both. By 1936 Paramount was employing a dual-projector, dual-screen apparatus to expand the scale of its background images.54 And by 1938 both Paramount and Warner Bros. had developed triple-head rear projectors, which superimposed three identical versions of the background image and thus supplied more light, making it possible to increase the screen size significantly.55 With the use of these new projectors, the studios were, by the end of the decade, employing screens of thirty-six feet wide for black-and-white backgrounds and fifteen to eighteen feet for colour work.56 By 1942, new rear-projection equipment, built to industry-wide standards that had been adopted in 1939, featured single-head projectors with equivalent power to the earlier triple-head models. Further, three of these units could be combined to create an even more powerful new triple-head projector. For The Forest Rangers (George Marshall, 1942), Paramount went so far as to use two of the new triple-head projectors with dual screens to achieve a Technicolor background image of a forest fire measuring forty-eight feet wide.57 The films employing such large-scale rear-projection arrangements often emphasized the creation of immersive virtual space. This dynamic is exemplified by The Plainsman, which made early use of Paramount’s dual-screen background set-up for the culminating battle sequence. The fifty-ton foreground set for this sequence was mounted on a wheeled support so that it could be turned. Director Cecil B. DeMille explained: Set up on the stage, we had not one screen, but two, behind this set, with the space between carefully masked by a dead tree in the set. Two projectors threw their images on these screens. The background-plates were made by two cameras, side by side, shooting at predetermined angles. For reverse-angle shots, the crew ‘simply turned our set around (though the 50-ton weight made it no small task), re-aligned the screens, and carried on with different backgrounds’.58 This use of multiple screens in production – which pairs the live-action foreground with multiple projected views of a pre-filmed background landscape, shot from opposing angles – results in a hermetically sealed diegetic space (figure 2). Such enclosure illustrates the form of entrapment or ‘claustration’ that Vivian Sobchack attributes to the use of rear projection in film noir, wherein the use of pre-filmed background imagery ‘works to temporally forestall and spatially foreclose any sense of the characters’ existential “freedom” and to make this construction sensually, as well as cognitively, intelligible to viewers’.59 Ironically The Plainsman, being a Western, harnesses this means of spatial entrapment to envisage the open space of the frontier. (Westerns continued to be made on location even after most other films were using rear projection; however, as suggested earlier, by the end of the 1930s they often employed the technique.)60 Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Dual screens facilitated the creation of a large rear-projected background in The Plainsman (Paramount, 1936). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Dual screens facilitated the creation of a large rear-projected background in The Plainsman (Paramount, 1936). Many other films – from nautical adventures such as Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) and Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935), to films featuring destructive blazes such as Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Typhoon (Louis King, 1940), to aerial spectacles such as Test Pilot (Victor Fleming, 1938) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (Mervyn LeRoy, 1944) – deployed rear projection to position actors in front of engulfing background images of water, fire and sky.61 In all such cases rear projection made it possible seemingly to immerse actors in what would otherwise be a dangerous environment, whether ‘hostile’ frontier, stormy ocean, flaming inferno or wild blue yonder. It is hardly coincidental that many of the pioneering experiments with large-scale rear-projection screens – including The Plainsman, Spawn of the North (Henry Hathaway, 1938), Gold Is Where You Find It (Michael Curtiz, 1938), Geronimo, Reap the Wild Wind (Cecil B. DeMille, 1942) and The Forest Rangers – were undertaken in the service of such spectacles. John Durham Peters argues that water, fire and sky should be understood as media in their own right, insofar as he conceptualizes media as ‘vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible’.62 Peters also considers the ships and aeroplanes that people use to survive at sea or in the air as media, since these vessels mediate humans and hostile environments, serving as the condition of human existence in such spaces.63 We can view the large-scale rear-projection screens used to transport such environments to Hollywood sound stages as proffering similar forms of mediation. These surfaces not only made it possible to present water, fire and sky as diegetic environments, but also functioned similarly to a ship’s bow or an aeroplane’s windscreen (or, relatedly, a fire screen) in forming an interface between humans and these environments. Indeed, the practice of placing rear-projection screens beyond the railings of on-set ships or behind the windscreens of on-set planes aligned the screens with these interfaces. As I have contended, the layering of image planes within a film was redoubled by the exhibition screen, which acted as yet another image plane stacked in deep space. The arraying of rear-projection screens within films also echoed the ways in which screens were being harnessed in exhibition. The rear-projection arrangement used at Paramount for The Plainsman and many other films – employing, as it did, two cameras shooting at angles from one another to capture the background footage, together with dual projectors and side-by-side screens on the set – mirrored experiments with multiple-camera, multiple-projector widescreen cinema being undertaken around the same time. The use of a revolving set with changeable projected backgrounds rendered The Plainsman’s production space, like the spaces envisioned in contemporaneous approaches to multiple-projector exhibition, a space constituted through the synthesis of multiple screened images. The early 1930s was a period of intense change not only in production but also in theatrical exhibition, as cinemas newly wired for sound confronted the Depression. Although the picture palaces built in the 1910s and 1920s continued to operate (usually with a pared down service staff and without the stage show), the theatres built or renovated in the 1930s increasingly forewent lavish ornamentation and revival themes in favour of functionalist modern design. In this context, engineers and architects reconceived the screen itself as the central focal point and structuring architectural component of the auditorium.64 In advocating the screen’s integration into auditorium space, these practitioners pursued a synthesis of virtual and actual domains within the theatre similar to – and conspiring with – that being carried out concurrently on Hollywood sound stages. Scholarly work has tended to emphasize how the screen and theatre design of this period encouraged spectatorial attention to and seeming immersion in the film onscreen, replacing the form of distracted spectatorship associated with older exhibition models.65 Attention to the range of ways in which practitioners worked to integrate screens into theatrical space in and around the 1930s, however, reveals how elements of this built space were harnessed not only to direct attention to the screen but also as components of a composite spectacle in their own right. I have argued that special-effects techniques such as rear projection marshalled filmed fragments into synthetic diegetic spaces in much the same way that concurrent practices in film sound were beginning to blend heterogeneous recordings into layered soundtracks. Film sound, however, also provides a useful model for addressing how this form of synthesis extended to the context of the movie theatre. As Emily Thompson has shown, the theatres wired or built for synchronized sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s favoured a model of synthetic sound space similar to that increasingly found on the soundtrack: the apparatus of sound reproduction collaborated closely with the apparatus of production to render sound space profoundly virtual.66 With screen technologies, too, theatrical installations worked in conjunction with on-set practices to endow the built environment of exhibition with the form of aggregate spatiality also evident onscreen. As mentioned earlier, synchronization itself emerges as a key concept in thinking not only about sound but also about screen technologies in this period. As a special-effects technique, rear projection became feasible in the early 1930s in part because electrical hook-ups that had been developed for synchronized sound made it newly possible to interlock the camera with a background projector.67 In fact rear projection was also known at the time as ‘synchro-projection’.68 The notion of synchronization was also applied to exhibition screens in this period. With the use of screen modifiers and curtain controllers, the images projected onto the screen were synchronized not only with the sounds emanating from the speakers, but also with moveable maskings or curtains framing the screen. One of the companies selling these systems advertised a curtain controller called the ‘Syncontrol’, promoting the ‘perfect synchronization’ that such equipment would provide to an exhibitor’s program (figure 3).69 Throughout the 1930s, as I discuss below, engineers also focused on means of aligning the lighting of the auditorium with the illumination of the screen. Benjamin Schlanger notably introduced a form of screen masking called the ‘screen synchrofield’, which sought to synchronize a play of light in the field around the screen with the play of light upon it, and multiple-camera, multiple-projector systems relied on the synchronization of cameras during production as well as projectors during exhibition. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Advertisement for Vallen curtain-control systems. Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 4 July 1931. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Advertisement for Vallen curtain-control systems. Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 4 July 1931. Beyond capitalizing on the popularity of synchronized sound (and electrical technologies’ association with instantaneity more broadly), this emphasis on synchronization evidences a particular temporal construction accompanying the application of screen technologies to spatial synthesis.70 By emphasizing the synchronicity of disparate components of cinema – including image(s), sound, screen frame and auditorium lighting – technical discourses indicated that the projected image and reproduced sound were not the only elements of the cinematic arrangement that existed in regimented time. As Michel Chion has argued, synchronism itself was ‘a marvelous phenomenon’ for the first spectators of sound film, and its impact lay in the way in which sound was inscribed in ‘real time – time chronographically counted, measured, divided, and fixed’.71 Just as synchronization transformed sound from a contingent element of exhibition to a standardized and technologically integrated part of the film itself, that concept also provided engineers with a model for thinking about the built space of exhibition as another component of the apparatus that existed in regimented time alongside the film. By suggesting an alignment of otherwise divergent temporalities, in other words, the notion of synchronization insisted on the dynamic temporality of the auditorium space itself, a temporality that, as Schlanger suggested in 1931, had previously been obscured by the ‘finite unchangeable forms’ characterizing the decoration of the picture palace.72 The auditorium was reimagined as a space that could, through elements such as lighting and screen masking, be technologically linked to the protean quality of the films unfolding within it. In her work on cinematic time, Mary Ann Doane argues that theatrical exhibition subordinates the temporality of reception to the temporality of the apparatus. The emphasis on synchronization that I am describing highlights the role that components of exhibition such as lighting and screen masking played in this apparatus, themselves fostering the interplay between temporal regimentation and contingency that, as she argues, imbricated cinematic time with modernity. Indeed, I would argue that with the pervasive emphasis on the temporal orchestration of technologies – spectacularizing a form of coordination that was always potentially fallible – film exhibition in this period proffered the experience of time as what Doane calls ‘presence’ or ‘immersion’ that was being threatened by its rationalization.73 With the effort to integrate screen and theatre space, in short, screens and their theatrical surroundings collaborated to form dynamic audiovisual syntheses. Borrowing a term from contemporaneous discourses on special effects, I would suggest that the practitioners designing theatrical screens and spaces in the 1930s, like those simultaneously developing screens for rear projection on the set, worked to produce new forms of ‘processed’ space by experimenting with diverse means of conjoining virtual and actual domains. The notion of processing emphasizes not only the synthetic nature of the resultant composites – their construction from a process of de- and re-composition – but also the dynamic, processual nature of this activity. The screens installed in the theatre worked to process heterogeneous spaces in some of the same ways as did the screens employed on the set. Here, too, we can map how screens worked to divide and reassemble spaces into new composites, and can assess the new synthetic spaces by charting how these surfaces were layered and, as I emphasize in what follows, arrayed. Between 1926 and 1931, the period in which Hollywood embraced synchronized sound, there had also been widespread experimentation with large-screen and widescreen exhibition.74 Increasing the scale of the projected image had become particularly desirable, not only with the advent of large picture palaces but also as a means of distinguishing cinema from the small screens already associated with television.75 The mid to late 1920s witnessed the development of several film exhibition systems that included large screens, wide screens, wide-gauge film, and various combinations thereof. Paramount, for instance, employed the Magnascope system for screenings of Old Ironsides (James Cruze, 1926), Chang (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1927) and Wings (William Wellman, 1927).76 At a time when standard theatrical screens were between sixteen and eighteen feet wide, and screens in even the largest picture palaces did not exceed twenty-four feet, Magnascope installations – which employed variable screen masking and a specially fitted third projector to alter the size of the image over the course of a film – boasted a screen that, when fully exposed at key points in the presentation, reached a width of forty feet (figure 4).77 By 1929 to 1930, all of the major studios were working with systems that featured wide-gauge film and wide aspect ratios, promising to enhance the quality and scope of images projected on large screens.78 Fox’s Grandeur system, for instance, employed 70mm film and a 2:1 aspect ratio. After initial demonstrations with a screen thirty-four feet wide, Grandeur presentations employed one of forty-two feet that, though only slightly surpassing Magnascope’s forty feet, was celebrated in publicity materials as ‘A screen twice the width of the old screen!’79 Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Diagram of the Magnascope system. Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, April 1928. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Diagram of the Magnascope system. Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, April 1928. The experiments with large-screen and widescreen exhibition, together with the embrace of synchronized sound, contributed to a transformation in the organization of theatrical space by blurring the boundary between audience and spectacle.80 Although Hollywood had abandoned the project of developing and standardizing widescreen cinema by May 1931, that spatial reconfiguration persisted in other theatrical arrangements in the subsequent years, well before widescreen’s re-emergence in the 1950s.81 Throughout the 1930s, engineers and architects remained committed to having the cinematic spectacle dominate the viewer’s field of vision. But in the absence of large screens, and especially with the massive auditoriums still in use, elements of theatre space threatened to intrude on the viewers’ overall visual experience. Practitioners working in theatre and screen design were particularly concerned that viewers’ perception of contrast between the illuminated screen and its darkened surroundings would result in discomfort, and throughout the decade there was a persistent call to minimize such contrast without thereby detracting from the visibility of the screen image itself.82 Work to that end involved overlapping practices related to the brightness of screens, the borders framing them, and the lighting of the auditoriums in which they were installed—and it extended to the use of multiple projection surfaces. These experiments reveal how the sense of scope associated with widescreen cinema carried over into later approaches to screen and theatre design. Widescreen had endowed the film image itself with a sense of scope, allowing a broad and busy mise-en-scene to fill the viewers’ visual field. In their attempt to blend adjacent spaces within and beyond the film image, architects and engineers in the 1930s attributed such scope to a visual field now taken to incorporate both screen and auditorium space. One suggested means of mitigating contrast between a bright screen and dark auditorium concerned the way in which screens were framed. General practice framed the screen with a three-to-four-inch-wide strip of black velvet, which absorbed light spilling from the screen’s edges and thus stabilized the image.83 That mask was, in turn, framed by a border of two to three feet in width, which could be black or another colour. For dimly illuminated screens, projection guru F. H. Richardson recommended a completely black border, extending from one inch inside the picture to anywhere between one and three feet outside it, in order to improve picture quality by enhancing contrast within the image.84 Others, however, contended that such wide black borders produced too great a contrast with the illuminated screen image itself, ‘subconsciously attracting the eyes to the frame rather than to the picture image’ and resulting in ‘eye fatigue’ or ‘even injury’.85 In order to diminish this contrast, many advocated either a soft grey border or a gradual shift from black (next to the picture) to the ‘predominant surrounding color’.86 In 1934 Eugene Clute, writing in the Motion Picture Herald, suggested extending such gradation into the design of the auditorium, proposing that ‘graded tones in paint might well be used in broad vertical bands on the walls at either side of the picture screen’.87 Here, the theatre space itself was treated as an extension of the screen border. The idea of illuminating the auditorium to a certain degree was offered as another strategy for mitigating the contrast between the bright screen and the dark space surrounding it. This practice had been advocated during the nickelodeon era as part of the endeavour to uplift cinema, and we might note that similar efforts were occurring in the 1930s.88 In Our Movie Made Children (1933), based on the Payne Fund Studies, for instance, Henry James Forman quoted concerns about the ‘dimly lighted’ nature of movie theatres to support claims about cinema’s dangers for children.89 As might be expected, engineers contended that darkened auditoriums enhanced the visibility of the projected image as well as the concentration of viewers’ attention.90 However, illuminating the auditorium was touted as offering several benefits, including the ‘visual comfort’ associated with reduced contrast as well as enhancements to convenience (helping moviegoers find their seats) and safety (reducing accidents and assuaging fears about untoward behaviour). Many engineers suggested that these benefits outweighed the improvements in visibility and concentration associated with fully darkening the auditorium.91 The Trans-Lux chain of newsreel theatres, which emerged in 1931 and operated throughout the remainder of the decade and beyond, boasted particularly brightly lit auditoriums.92 These theatres employed rear projection in place of the front-projection arrangement otherwise predominant in US cinemas.93 With the use of rear projection in exhibition, the auditorium could remain more brightly lit than usual because the screen transmitted light rather than reflecting it as was standard. Such rear-projection theatres reportedly had auditoriums illuminated to about 30 per cent of the full lighting (i.e., between screenings) at an average theatre.94 In 1939, Benjamin Schlanger boasted that his own front-projection arrangements had matched and even exceeded the light levels found at such theatres.95 In more closely equalizing the brightness of the screen and the illumination of the theatre, these theatrical arrangements echoed the concurrent use of rear projection in production, which also relied on the approximate matching of screen brightness and ambient illumination (in that case, set lighting) to blend virtual and actual domains.96 Indeed, the rear-projection screens manufactured by the Trans-Lux Corporation were used in both contexts.97 Some practitioners effectively combined the effort to mitigate contrast through graded screen borders with the work on auditorium lighting by exploring illuminated screen borders. In a report to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) in autumn 1935, representatives from the University of Rochester Institute of Optics and Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories, citing vision research, contended that contrast between high central and low peripheral illumination produced eye-strain and suggested that engineers ‘be prepared for changes in projection practice that may involve a border brightness that is low, but not negligible, as compared to the brightness of the screen’.98 In an SMPE presentation in the spring of 1936, representatives from the General Electric Lighting Research Laboratory recommended ‘that experiments be made by surrounding the screen with uniform brightnesses of different magnitudes less than the screen brightness’, and they diagrammed an auditorium layout in which the screen was surrounded by a luminous ‘intermediate’ and ‘peripheral’ fields (figure 5). This included reflective curtains in the space immediately surrounding the screen as well as front and side walls of low brightness, which, they contended, was ‘better for easy, comfortable and safe seeing than ‘darkness’, which is so prevalent now’.99 Like Eugene Clute’s 1934 suggestion of graded painting for the auditorium, the idea of creating a luminous field around the screen by framing it with reflective materials would work to extend elements of the screen into the theatre space. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Illustration of proposed theatrical arrangement in which the screen is surrounded by luminous fields. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, May 1936. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Illustration of proposed theatrical arrangement in which the screen is surrounded by luminous fields. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, May 1936. This project was carried out most prominently by Benjamin Schlanger as part of a broad effort to design theatres specifically for cinema, and in doing so to calibrate the relationship of viewer and view in a more scientific manner than had previously been achieved.100 In 1932, for instance, Schlanger echoed an idea shared by many engineers in contending that, with black velvet screen masking, ‘because of contrast, the eye is always somewhat conscious of the frame, instead of the picture image only’, resulting in distraction, eye fatigue, and destruction of the cinematic illusion. In place of black masking, he proposed making the screen image ‘blend into the side walls and ceiling’ by having the ‘illuminated screen and its surrounding surfaces […] appear as an even tone of light stretching from side wall to side wall’. Schlanger put this idea, together with his design for a reverse-sloped orchestra floor, into practice at the Thalia Theatre (converted in 1931), which used recessed masking that allowed a ‘haze of light’, emanating from the side wings, to surround the screen.101 Schlanger, however, maintained a particular interest in employing light not only to mesh screen and theatre space, but also to endow the point of transition between them with a flexibility and dynamism appropriate to cinema. As early as 1931 he contended that the front portion of the auditorium, where ‘the transition from the auditorium to the presentation takes place’, should be ‘flexible, and there is no reason why its form cannot be changeable and its lighting effects varied, to suit the tempo of what is being presented’. Advocating for a unified theatrical environment that would ‘assist rather than compete with the presentation’, he proposed employing bands or areas of light to give ‘an effect, by varying the intensity of the different parts at different times which could be synchronized with the presentation, as well as the musical and sound accompaniments’.102 In short, the flexible use of light within the auditorium, synchronized with the dynamic play of light onscreen, would allow theatrical space to collaborate with the projected film, as well as with the reproduced sound, as part of a unified system producing an overall ‘effect’. This was a goal pursued by Schlanger in the second half of the 1930s and beyond. The concept for dynamic screen border lighting that would integrate the screen with the theatrical space surrounding it was realized with the screen synchrofield system that Schlanger developed with the electrical engineer Jacob Gilston and first demonstrated in 1937. In place of black masking, this system framed the screen with diffusive and reflective surfaces positioned at an angle behind and beyond its edges (figure 6). As in the other experiments with illuminated screen borders taking place around this time – and as in Schlanger’s own design for the screen-surround at the Thalia – the screen synchrofield system thus allowed light from the projector to spill beyond the edges of the frame, creating what Schlanger described as an ‘illuminated field contiguous to the screen proper’. Schlanger, however, now opined that ‘screen-border illumination of a fixed intensity and color’, like that at the Thalia, ‘can prove to be just as artificial and frame-creating as the present black border when the marginal areas of the picture are dark compared to the contiguous illuminated border’. The screen synchrofield system ameliorated that problem by endowing the illuminated border with ‘a constantly changing intensity of light and color’ that varied ‘along the four sides of the screen to match and blend the various edge conditions of the picture into the surrounding field’.103 Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Diagram of Benjamin Schlanger's ‘screen synchrofield’ system. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, May 1938. Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Diagram of Benjamin Schlanger's ‘screen synchrofield’ system. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, May 1938. Schlanger’s plan for the screen synchrofield, like other work on illuminated screen borders, emerged within a context in which, as one observer put it in 1931, trends in theatre illumination were embracing the ‘use of light aesthetically’.104 Some high-profile theatres in this period featured colour organs (such as Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux) or elaborate dimmer systems, which could create dynamic lighting effects within the auditorium as well as onstage, facilitating the ‘harmonization of illumination to the mood of those who come to the theatre for entertainment’.105 Certain theatres, moreover, such as those run by Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, had for years been experimenting with plays of light on or around the screen, contributing to what Ross Melnick describes as Rothafel’s effort to marshal disparate components of exhibition, including lighting and films, into a ‘unitary text’.106 Schlanger, however, maintained that before the advent of the screen synchrofield it ‘was practically impossible to create automatically colors and light intensities that would match the ever-changing colors and intensities occurring in the marginal areas of the picture’.107 Although he admitted in 1939 that others had experimented with creating dynamic lighting schemes aligned with films, he contended that those schemes had ‘all of the disadvantages of the music cue sheets that had to be supplied to each exhibitor in connection with the silent pictures’.108 Whereas the lighted screen border at the Thalia was static and other moving-light surrounds were created as live performances, in other words, the screen synchrofield produced an illuminated field around the screen that was not only dynamic but also ‘automatically’ synchronized with the film itself. By 1939, Schlanger had extended his synchrofield concept beyond the screen border and into auditorium design, recommending that all interior surfaces seen in combination with the screen, including ceiling and walls, be made white or nearly white so that they would also re-reflect light from the screen – a project he pursued into the 1940s.109 Schlanger’s design for the Island Theatre in Bermuda in 1946, for instance, completely eliminated black masking around the screen, making the screen seem to float on the light-coloured wall at the front of the auditorium and allowing light from the screen to spill into the surrounding area.110 In the early 1950s Schlanger would further develop this system into the RCA Synchro Screen or ‘maskless screen’ that, as William Paul has contended, preceded and anticipated the widescreen revolution of that decade.111 In causing projected light to seep beyond the edges of the screen, Schlanger’s screen synchrofield system and approach to auditorium design promised to do more than blur the boundary between screen and theatre space. By making the screen border and auditorium interior themselves secondary surfaces for reflecting light from the projector, Schlanger’s scheme promised to unite heterogeneous components of theatrical space (screen, border, walls, and ceiling) into a single synchronized ‘field’ marked by the dynamism of cinema. This synthetic theatrical space echoed the composite diegetic spaces being created concurrently through special-effects techniques such as rear projection. Schlanger described the work of the screen synchrofield as a ‘blending of the picture edge into the surrounding field’, which would itself ‘blend’ with the side walls of the auditorium.112 Like the concurrent use of rear projection – especially with the multiple-screen backgrounds being developed around the same time – the screen synchrofield thus created new syntheses through the ‘blending’ and synchronization of contiguous surfaces. Schlanger was certainly a unique figure. He brought to the mainstream film industry notions more clearly at home in the avant garde – such as the prospect of using light as a building material, which was central to the way modern architects and artists such as Le Corbusier and László Moholy-Nagy were, around the same time, incorporating cinematic concepts into their work – and many of the ideas he proposed were not widely adopted, or not adopted right away.113 But even so, Schlanger was an important figure in the US film industry, active in the SMPE throughout the 1930s and beyond, and widely published in the trade press. Indeed Schlanger’s articles, as Paul argues, ‘became the strongest and ultimately most influential voice for a modernist aesthetic in theater design’.114 As I have shown, moreover, even Schlanger’s most fanciful ideas, such as the screen synchrofield, were rooted in broadly shared concerns and practices, especially the effort to synthesize and synchronize screen and theatre space. In 1937, the year Paramount received an Academy Award for its dual-screen rear-projection apparatus and Schlanger unveiled his screen synchrofield system, the inventor Fred Waller began working on a system for multiple-projector exhibition. Waller had headed Paramount’s special-effects department from 1924 to 1926, developing an optical printer that could combine up to seven original images into a single composite. Through that work, he became interested in the prospect that wide angles would supply the impression of depth.115 According to his future collaborator, the architect Ralph Walker, Waller’s background in special effects had propelled him to approach that ‘problem from the direction of the wide-angle lens and multiple images on an extra-wide screen’.116 When Walker’s architectural firm was invited to design an exhibit for the petroleum industry at the New York World’s Fair to take place in 1939, Walker envisioned ‘a huge room, spherical in shape, on the walls of which would be thrown a constant stream of moving pictures from an entire battery of projectors’, creating ‘the entire panorama of petroleum’ through a ‘sort of contrapuntal montage’.117 He invited Waller to work out the technicalities of such projection, and Waller set to work on what would be dubbed the Vitarama system. Vitarama’s filming apparatus featured eleven 16mm cameras collected on a single mount and driven by a shared motor. In showing the films, eleven synchronized projectors threw contiguous images onto a screen shaped as the section of a sphere, creating what Waller called a ‘mosaic effect’.118 In order to ‘increase the illusion of being in and surrounded by an environment’, initial plans for the system also included directional sound, which was to involve a separate soundtrack and speaker for each filmstrip and projector.119 Although Vitarama did not end up being used for the petroleum exhibit, Waller designed a system to project a similar ‘mosaic’ of still colour photographs for the Eastman Kodak exhibit, and he continued to work on Vitarama outside the context of the fair. By 1939, Waller and Walker had convinced Laurance Rockefeller to invest in the Vitarama Corporation, and they discussed the prospect of installing Vitarama at the former RKO Roxy Theatre (then called the Center Theatre) in Rockefeller Center. With the mounting war, however, that installation did not come to pass. In 1940 Waller instead began working to redesign Vitarama as an apparatus to train machine gunners. He would later streamline it into the Cinerama system, which helped to resuscitate widescreen cinema in 1952.120 The Vitarama system brings together several of the threads weaving through this essay. Vitarama expanded the scale and scope of the projected image in a manner reminiscent of the large-screen and widescreen experiments of 1926 to 1931. Since Waller was still at Paramount in 1926, as has been pointed out, he would have known about Magnascope.121 Vitarama was also, more specifically, one of several multiple-projector systems employed for large-screen exhibition throughout the period I have been discussing. Multiple projection had long been an important strategy for achieving widescreen cinema, from the Cinéorama system of 1900 to Abel Gance’s Polyvision system of 1927.122 Such experiments persisted even after Hollywood’s circa-1931 abandonment of widescreen. At the opening of the RKO Roxy in December 1932, for instance, when the full expanse of the theatre’s widely heralded sixty-foot screen was devoted to a short film documenting the construction of Radio City, three projectors were employed to achieve the large image.123 In 1937, widescreen pioneer Henri Chrétien employed two synchronized projectors outfitted with anamorphic lenses to fill a sixty-by-ten-metre screen on the facade of the Palace of Light at the International Exposition in Paris.124 In late 1937, David O. Selznick learned about Waller’s experiments and began to explore the prospect of using multiple-projector exhibition for the ‘burning of Atlanta’ and other spectacle sequences in Gone with the Wind, a pursuit that continued through the length of the film’s production (although Selznick and production manager Raymond A. Klune discussed plans for a ‘triple-screen’ setup, the apparatus employed for test footage featured two cameras and two projectors).125 These experiments with multiple-projector exhibition pursued a form of compositing – the amalgamation of images shot with different cameras and from different angles – analogous to the processing being achieved concurrently through special effects. Multiple-projector exhibition endowed the theatre space with the kind of synthetic spatiality and synchronous temporality that optical printers (such as the one Waller devised at Paramount) and rear-projection systems (such as those I discussed earlier) were creating in production. Indeed, as we have seen, multiple-projector exhibition systems such as Waller’s emerged on the heels of Paramount’s dual-projector, dual-screen apparatus for rear projection on the set. Like Waller’s work on Vitarama between 1937 and 1939, Schlanger’s experiments in screen and theatre design in the mid to late 1930s also emphasized integrating components of central and peripheral vision, expanding screened images so that they might fill the viewer’s visual field in a manner reminiscent of widescreen cinema. As mentioned, in fact, both Waller and Schlanger would serve as important figures when widescreen re-emerged in the 1950s, Waller with the Cinerama system developed from Vitarama and Schlanger with the RCA Synchro Screen developed from the screen synchrofield system. Although Schlanger, as far as I know, did not explore the use of multiple projectors, his work in the latter part of the 1930s also effectively multiplied screening surfaces within the theatre.126 Both the screen synchrofield and the reflective wall and ceiling surfaces he designed, as we have seen, functioned to carry projected images into theatrical space. In doing so, they joined multiple surfaces within that space – screen, screen border, walls and ceiling – into synchronous composites. Exploring screen practices across the domains of production and exhibition thus makes it clear that the use of synthetic imagery and multiple screens did not arise with the introduction of ‘new’ digital media, but in fact contributed to the dispositif of mainstream theatrical cinema in the USA at the height of the classical era. Insofar as a focus on screen technologies highlights the role these objects played both onscreen and in the theatre, in other words, classical-era theatrical cinema emerges as an instance of multiscreen practice deeply rooted in the forms of compositing that screens made possible. With the use of screens on sound stages and in movie theatres in and around the 1930s, cinematic space was constructed through the layering and arraying of image planes. Such practices incorporated screens of differing size and construction, from the large reflective surfaces employed for widescreen cinema to the tiny light-emitting ones used for miniature rear projection. Despite the screens’ material diversity, these practices contributed collaboratively to the formation of synthetic spaces marked by temporal synchronization. The emphasis on spatial synthesis and temporal synchronization aligned Hollywood practice with the multiscreen experiments also taking place within the avant garde around this time. Designers associated with the Bauhaus were incorporating multiple projections into the design of spaces for theatre and art exhibition by the mid 1920s. In 1925, for instance, László Moholy-Nagy had called for a ‘simultaneous or poly-cinema’ that would entail multiple films projected onto (and moving across) a large screen shaped as the segment of a sphere, as well as for a ‘Theatre of Totality’ that would include – in the service of ‘spatial light displays’ – a full-size rear-projection screen as well as additional reflective surfaces for onstage projections.127 Walter Gropius’s unrealized plan for a ‘Total Theatre’, commissioned in 1927 by Erwin Piscator, entailed twelve projectors and screens on the walls, ceiling, and stage backgrounds, which would help transform the theatre into a ‘flexible space-machine’.128 Such designs employed multiple projection in the service of a modernist interest in spatiotemporal reorganization through multiperspectivality, transparency and simultaneity. The Bauhaus designers were invested in harnessing such multiple perspectives to create what Fred Turner terms a ‘democratic surround’, an immersive but diverse environment that would encourage observers to assimilate ideas in order to better understand and shape themselves and society.129 In tending to emphasize unity over fragmentation, Hollywood’s employment of multiple projection failed to offer viewers the level of psychological independence advocated by members of the Bauhaus. As I have argued, however, the commercial film industry’s use of multiple screens across production and exhibition contributed to configurations that were nevertheless marked by a similar spatiotemporal logic. Indeed, the application of multiple screens to spatial synthesis and temporal synchronization traversed a range of mediatic institutions and sites in this period. Such a traversal is evident, for instance, in the heterogeneous roots and applications of Vitarama, which was indebted both to Waller’s background in special effects at Paramount and to Walker’s plan for a form of exhibition echoing Moholy-Nagy’s ideas – and which was envisaged for industrial use at the New York World’s Fair, military deployment by the US Armed Forces, and commercial exploitation by Hollywood. Recognizing the role played in and around the 1930s by multiple screens – many of which were small, light emitting and, though not detailed here, mobile – may also seem to align historical cinema with contemporary mediatic arrangements. Yet moving away from a focus on the material qualities of screens (such as single/multiple) and attending instead to the spatiotemporal formations they foster reveals significant differences between historical and contemporary dispositifs. Indeed I suggest that it is the emphasis on spatial synthesis and temporal synchronization, more than the screens’ material qualities (or the representational attributes associated with them, such as unity/fragmentation), that sets the dispositifs of the classical era apart. Most audiovisual screens of the twentieth century worked simultaneously to anchor onscreen representation (through the frame) and to give the depicted space a specific position in actual space (through its manifestation on the screen surface). This representational anchoring and material positioning served as a condition of the screens’ application to spatial synthesis. Although the screens gracing contemporary devices such as smartphones, tablets and virtual-reality headsets continue to give support to moving images, these surfaces do not always or necessarily work to anchor mediated space or attach it to actual space in the same way. With applications exploiting the sensors and tracking systems employed by these devices (from Google Maps to various augmented-reality and virtual-reality experiences), the screen’s relationship to represented space is often volatile. What is shown on the screen is not delimited by a film or video frame but rather contingent on the orientation, position and movement of the screen itself. In untethering representation from the frame, such applications do not unmoor virtual space but rather laminate it onto actual space. Moving the screen thus no longer resituates representation within actual space but instead reveals a different perspective on an already situated virtual space.130 As a result, the screen no longer functions primarily to synthesize or synchronize spaces. Such contemporary screen practices operate according to a different spatiotemporal logic, which has to do less with forming new composites than with making manifest the forms of mediation that underlie existing spaces. Acknowledgement This research was assisted by an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Footnotes 1 See Gabriele Pedullà, In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema, trans. Patricia Gaborik (New York, NY: Verso, 2012). 2 See Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (London: Macmillan, 1980), and Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986). 3 See, for instance, Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 191–239. 4 For an exemplary representative of such work, see Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). 5 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 6 Will Straw, ‘Proliferating screens’, Screen, vol. 41, no. 1 (2000), pp. 115–19; Mary Ann Doane, ‘The close-up: scale and detail in the cinema’, differences, vol. 14, no. 3 (2003), pp. 89–111; Haidee Wasson, ‘The networked screen: moving images, materiality and the aesthetics of size’, in Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord (eds), Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 74–95. 7 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), and Friedberg, The Virtual Window. 8 Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Encapsulated bodies in motion: simulators and the quest for total immersion’, in Simon Penny (ed.), Critical Issues in Electronic Media (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 159–86; Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008). 9 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 60–103, and Charles R. Acland, ‘Curtains, carts and the mobile screen’, Screen, vol. 50, no. 1 (2009), pp. 148–66. 10 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Enclosed by images: the Eames’ multimedia architecture’, Grey Room, no. 2 (2001), pp. 6–29; Janine Marchessault, ‘Multi-screens and future cinema: The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67’, in Marchessault and Lord (eds), Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, pp. 29–51; Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 11 Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Elements of screenology: toward an archaeology of the screen’, Iconics, no. 7 (2004), pp. 31–82, and Haidee Wasson, ‘The other small screen: moving images at New York’s World Fair, 1939’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (2012), pp. 81–103. 12 Haidee Wasson, Introduction to ‘In Focus: Screen Technologies’, Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 2 (2012), p. 143. 13 Tom Gunning, ‘An aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the (in)credulous spectator’, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989), pp. 31–45; Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Noam M. Elcott, ‘Rooms of our time: László Moholy-Nagy and the stillbirth of multi-media museums’, in Tamara Trodd (ed.), Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 25–52. See also Miriam Hansen, ‘Early cinema, late cinema: permutations of the public sphere’, Screen, vol. 34, no. 3 (1993), pp. 197–210; Frank Kessler, ‘The cinema of attractions as Dispositif’, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 57–69; Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), esp. pp. 165–228. 14 Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 371. This project also represents one way of taking up Erkki Huhtamo’s call for an ‘archaeology of the screen’, in Huhtamo, ‘Elements of screenology’. 15 Francesco Casetti, ‘Notes on a genealogy of the excessive screen’, in Screens (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2017). Booklet for Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Genealogies of the Excessive Screen, Yale University, February–December 2017, <http://dev.screens.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Screens_Booklet.pdf> accessed 16 March 2019. See also Francesco Casetti, ‘Primal screens’, in Rüdiger Campe, Francesco Casetti and Craig Buckley (eds), The Excessive Screen: Optical Media, Environmental Genealogies (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 16 Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 131–33; Friedberg, The Virtual Window, pp. 149–80; Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 17 See Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 14–17; Friedberg, The Virtual Window, pp. 15–18; Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, pp. 157–69. 18 See Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The apparatus: metapsychological approaches to the impression of reality in the cinema’, in Rosen (ed), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, pp. 299–318. For discussions of this concept, see also Frank Kessler, ‘Notes on dispositif’, November 2007, <http://www.frankkessler.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Dispositif-Notes.pdf> accessed 16 March 2019; Will Straw, ‘Pulling apart the apparatus’, Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry, vol. 31 (2011), pp. 59–73; François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds), Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 19 See, for instance, Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, p. 282. 20 See Michel Foucault, ‘The confession of the flesh’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–98; Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 338–48; Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–24; Kessler, ‘The cinema of attractions as dispositif’, pp. 61–62; Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, pp. 101–36; Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, pp. 67–97. 21 Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, p. 131. 22 See Laura Mulvey, ‘Rear-projection and the paradoxes of Hollywood realism’, in Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Kumar Dudrah (eds), Theorizing World Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2012), p. 212. 23 Ben Schlanger, ‘Motion picture theatres of tomorrow’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 14 February 1931, pp. 57, 56. 24 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), esp. pp. 293–308. 25 Ibid., pp. 298–99. For the argument that contemporary digital visual effects do not mark a radical break from earlier analogue effects, see Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pp. 4–5. 26 See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 27 See, in particular, Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘The mass production of the senses: classical cinema as vernacular modernism’, Modernism/modernity, vol. 6, no. 2 (1999), pp. 59–77. See also Adrian Danks, ‘Being in two places at the same time: the forgotten geography of rear-projection’, in Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis (eds), B Is For Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), p. 70. 28 See Julie Turnock, ‘The screen on the set: the problem of classical-studio rear projection’, Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 2 (2012), pp. 157–62, and Julie Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 30–40. 29 For a detailed technical discussion of rear projection, see Raymond Fielding, The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography, 4th edn (Oxford: Focal Press, 1985), pp. 245–89. For early descriptions by technicians, see Ralph G. Fear, ‘Projected background anematography’, American Cinematographer, January 1932, pp. 11–12, 26, and Farciot Edouart, ‘The transparency projection process’, American Cinematographer, July 1932, pp. 15, 39. 30 George E. Turner, ‘The evolution of special visual effects’, in Turner (ed.), The ASC Treasury of Visual Effects (Hollywood, CA: American Society of Cinematographers, 1983), p. 46, and Tom Gunning, ‘Phantasmagoria and the manufacturing of wonder: towards a cultural optics of the cinematic apparatus’, in André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell and Pierre Véronneau (eds), The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century (Lausanne: Editions Payot Lausanne, 2004), p. 34. 31 See Farciot Edouart, ‘Paramount transparency process projection equipment’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (hereafter JSMPE), vol. 40, no. 6 (1943), pp. 368–69. 32 See Dominique Païni, ‘The wandering gaze: Hitchcock’s use of transparencies’, in Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval (eds), Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2000), pp. 51–78; Laura Mulvey, ‘A clumsy sublime’, Film Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 3 (2007), p. 3; Mulvey, ‘Rear projection and the paradoxes of Hollywood realism’, pp. 211–14. 33 Païni, ‘The wandering gaze’, p. 69. 34 Vernon L. Walker, ‘Use of miniatures in process backgrounds’, American Cinematographer, August 1934, p. 162. 35 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, pp. 150–51; Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The new film history as media archaeology’, Cinémas, vol. 14, no. 2/3 (2004), p. 109. 36 David Bordwell, ‘The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 50, 52–53. 37 See Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 144–212; Ray Zone, Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838–1952 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), pp. 143–49; William Paul, ‘The aesthetics of emergence’, Film History, vol. 5, no. 3 (1993), p. 333; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, ‘Technological change and classical film style’, in Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 136–40. 38 James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 203–15. 39 See Farciot Edouart, ‘Economic advantages of process photography’, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Technical Bulletin, supplement no. 9, 20 July 1932, pp. 4, 7–10; Vernon Walker, ‘Saunders cellulose screen reduces “hot spot”’, American Cinematographer, October 1932, p. 11; G. G. Popovici, ‘Recent developments in background projection’, JSMPE, vol. 30, no. 5 (1938), pp. 538–40. 40 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, pp. 7–12. 41 See Carl Louis Gregory, ‘Trick photography’, Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (hereafter TSMPE), no. 25 (1926), pp. 104–05; G. A. Chambers, ‘Process photography’, JSMPE, vol. 18, no. 6 (1932), p. 783; J. A. Norling, ‘Trick and process cinematography’, JSMPE, vol. 28, no. 2 (1937), p. 151. 42 See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 493–95; Friedberg, The Virtual Window, pp. 117–23; Eve Blau, ‘Transparency and the irreconcilable contradictions of modernity’, Praxis, no. 9 (2007), pp. 50–59; Jennifer Wild, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–1923 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 23–61. 43 Orville Goldner and George E. Turner, The Making of King Kong: The Story Behind a Film Classic (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1975), pp. 62, 88–95; Linwood G. Dunn, ‘Creating film magic for the original “King Kong”’, American Cinematographer, January 1977, pp. 96–97. 44 On King Kong’s soundtrack, see Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 70–91. For a reassessment of King Kong’s score, also see Michael Slowik, After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014). 45 Noël Carroll, ‘King Kong: ape and essence’, in Interpreting the Moving Image (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 135. 46 See Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2008), pp. 91–92, and Lisa Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 80–81. 47 On King Kong’s politics of representation, see James A. Snead, ‘Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look’, in Valerie Smith (ed.), Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 25–45, and Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 157–91. 48 Snead, ‘Spectatorship and capture in King Kong’, pp. 42, 44. 49 For a different reading of Kong’s association with the sense of touch, see Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture, 2nd edn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 109–12. 50 Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 73–135. 51 On similar dynamics in Tarzan the Ape Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1932), for instance, see Jacob Smith, The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity and Stunt Performance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 113–14. 52 A. F. Edouart, ‘Paramount triple-head transparency process projector’, JSMPE, vol. 33, no. 2 (1939), p. 180. 53 Edouart, ‘Economic advantages of process photography’, pp. 8-10, and Walker, ‘Saunders cellulose screen reduces “hot spot”’, p. 11. 54 William Stull, ‘Process shots aided by triple projector’, American Cinematographer, August 1939, p. 363. 55 Edouart, ‘Paramount triple-head transparency process projector’, pp. 171–84; Byron Haskin, ‘Development and practical application of the triple-head background projector’, JSMPE, vol. 34, no. 3 (1940), pp. 252–58. 56 A. F. Edouart, ‘Work of the Process Projection Equipment Committee of the Research Council’, JSMPE, vol. 33, no. 3 (1939), p. 252, and Stull, ‘Process shots aided by triple projector’, p. 364. 57 Edouart, ‘Paramount transparency process projection equipment’, pp. 371, 372–73, and Farciot Edouart, ‘The evolution of transparency process photography’, American Cinematographer, October 1943, p. 382. 58 Cecil DeMille, ‘A director looks at “process-shots”’, American Cinematographer, November 1936, pp. 458–59. 59 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Detour: driving in back projection, or forestalled by film noir’, in Robert Miklitsch (ed.), Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), p. 117. 60 See Walter Blanchard, ‘Production economies with process photography’, American Cinematographer, July 1934, p. 110, and Stull, ‘Process shots aided by triple projector’, p. 376. 61 C. Wilson, ‘Production problems of the writer as related to the technician’, JSMPE, vol. 26, no. 6 (1936), pp. 672–73; Fred W. Jackman, ‘“Process-shot” economies made “Captain Blood” possible’, American Cinematographer, February 1936, pp. 48–49, 61–62; Gone with the Wind Set List, 23 January 1939, folder 45: Gone with the Wind (misc), Vertical File Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter MHL); ‘Additional transparency and straight shots required for TYPHOON as outlined by Louis King, Oct. 16th’, Typhoon folder 3: production, Paramount Pictures Production Records, MHL; A. Arnold Gillespie, The Wizard of MGM: Memoirs of A. Arnold Gillespie, Art Director/Head of Special Effects from 1924–1965, ed. Philip J. Riley and Robert A. Welch (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2011), pp. 293–94, 76. 62 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 2. 63 Ibid., pp. 101–02, 111–12. 64 See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 72–75; Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 90–127; Amir H. Ameri, ‘The architecture of the illusive distance’, Screen, vol. 54, no. 4 (2013), pp. 439–62; William Paul, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition and the Evolution of American Film (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 230–74; Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 19–100. 65 See, for instance, Friedberg, The Virtual Window, p. 170. 66 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), esp. pp. 7, 229–315. 67 Edouart, ‘Paramount transparency process projection equipment’, p. 369. 68 Turner, ‘The evolution of special visual effects’, p. 45. Also see Fear, ‘Projected background anematography’, p. 11. 69 See advertisement for Vallen Automatic Screen Modifier, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 11 April 1931, p. 85; advertisement for Vallen Automatic Curtain Control, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 4 July 1931, p. 48; and ‘Screen masks’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 11 April 1931, p. 113. 70 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 151. See also Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), esp. pp. 19–61. 71 Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 37, 23. 72 Benjamin Schlanger, ‘Reversing the form and inclination of the motion picture theater floor for improving vision’, JSMPE, vol. 17, no. 2 (1931), p. 167. 73 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, pp. 30, 222. See also Lee Carruthers, ‘M. Bazin et le temps: reclaiming the Timeliness of cinematic time’, Screen, vol. 52, no. 1 (2011), pp. 13–29. 74 John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 34–51. 75 John Belton, ‘Fox and 50mm film’, in John Belton, Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale (eds), Widescreen Worldwide (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2010), p. 11. 76 Industrial discourse identified Old Ironsides’ presentation at the Rivoli theatre in December 1926 as the first use of Magnascope. But it should be noted that the Magnascope lens was employed as early as February 1925. H. Rubin, ‘The Magnascope’, TSMPE, vol. 12, no. 34 (1928), p. 403, and John Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 36, 244, fn.10. 77 See Belton, Widescreen Cinema, p. 36; Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace (New York, NY: Bramhall House, 1961), p. 200; ‘Motion-picture invention promises startling effects on silver sheet’, Los Angeles Times, 23 February 1930, p. B9. See also F. H. Richardson, Handbook of Projection: The Blue Book of Projection, Volume I, 5th edn (New York, NY: Chalmers Publishing Company, 1927), pp. 243–46. 78 Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 47–50. 79 List of exhibitions, 1929–1930, 3 August 1955, Box 10 (General Files Fr-Gr), Grandeur (History) 1960 folder, Earl I. Sponable Papers, Columbia University Libraries; Advertisement for Happy Days at the Roxy Theatre, The New York Times, 16 February 1930, p. X7, emphasis removed, in folder 2829 (New York, Manhattan [Roxy Theatre] – advertising 1927–1930), Tom B’hend and Preston Kaufmann collection, MHL. 80 See Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 34, 38; Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 90-92; Ameri, ‘The architecture of the illusive distance’, p. 452; Paul, When Movies Were Theater, pp. 239, 255–74. 81 On the abandonment of widescreen, see ‘Wide film goes back on the shelf as lens makers quit’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 9 May 1931, p. 23; ‘Progress in the motion picture industry’, JSMPE, vol. 17, no. 1 (1931), p. 71; Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 52–68; Belton, ‘Fox and 50mm film’, pp. 14–18. 82 See, for instance, ‘Theater lighting’, JSMPE, vol. 14, no. 4 (1930), pp. 441–42; B. O’Brien and C. M. Tuttle, ‘An experimental investigation of projection screen brightness’, JSMPE, vol. 26, no. 5 (1936), p. 506; M. Luckiesh and F. K. Moss, ‘Motion picture screen as a lighting problem’, JSMPE, vol. 26, no. 5 (1936), pp. 588–89; and B. Schlanger, ‘Motion picture auditorium lighting’, JSMPE, vol. 34, no. 3 (1940), p. 262. 83 See ‘Report of the Screens Committee’, Motion Picture Projectionist, November 1931, p. 34; F. H. Richardson, ‘F. H. Richardson’s comment and answers to inquiries’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 21 November 1931, p. 51; and B. Schlanger, ‘Projectionist's interest in auditorium viewing conditions’, JSMPE, vol. 34, no. 6 (1940), pp. 586–87. 84 F. H. Richardson, ‘F. H. Richardson’s comment and answers to inquiries’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 24 September 1932, p. 22; Richardson, Handbook of Projection, p. 241. 85 Frederic Arden Pawley, ‘Design of motion picture theaters’, Architectural Record, June 1932, p. 433, and O’Brien and Tuttle, ‘Experimental investigation of projection screen brightness’, p. 506. 86 Pawley, ‘Design of motion picture theaters’, p. 433. 87 Eugene Clute, ‘New schemes in modern remodeling’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 17 November 1934, p. 18. 88 See Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 39, and Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 147. 89 Dr R. L. Whitley, quoted in Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1933), p. 259. On the Payne Fund Studies, see Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie and Kathryn H. Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 90 ‘Theater lighting’, p. 442, and President Crabtree, quoted in ‘Report of the Theater Lighting Committee’, JSMPE, vol. 16, no. 2 (1931), p. 242. 91 See, for instance, ‘Theater lighting’, p. 442; S. K. Wolf, ‘Analysis of theater and screen illumination data’, JSMPE, vol. 26, no. 5 (1936), pp. 533–34; Luckiesh and Moss, ‘Motion picture screen as a lighting problem’, pp. 586–88; F. M. Falge and W. D. Riddle, ‘Lighting of motion picture theater auditoriums’, JSMPE, vol. 32, no. 2 (1939), pp. 201–02. 92 See George Schutz and F. H. Richardson, ‘The Trans-Lux system of operation’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 9 May 1931, pp. 12–13, and William Mayer, ‘Trans Lux rear stage projection’, Motion Picture Projectionist, October 1931, pp. 12–13. For discussions of Trans-Lux theatres within scholarly work, also see Gomery, Shared Pleasures, pp. 14–49, and Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911–1967, 2nd edn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), pp. 124–25. 93 On the use of rear projection for exhibition in France, see Wild, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, pp. 23–61. 94 ‘Report of the Projection Screens Committee’, JSMPE, vol. 18, no. 2 (1932), p. 250. 95 Mr Schlanger, quoted in Falge and Riddle, ‘Lighting of motion picture theater auditoriums’, p. 212. 96 See Edouart, ‘The transparency projection process’, p. 39. 97 On the use of Trans-Lux screens in production, see G. G. Popovici, ‘Background projection for process cinematography’, JSMPE, vol. 24, no. 2 (1935), p. 105. 98 O’Brien and Tuttle, ‘An experimental investigation of projection screen brightness’, p. 506. 99 Luckiesh and Moss, ‘Motion picture screen as a lighting problem’, pp. 588–89, 589. 100 See Paul, When Movies Were Theater, pp. 239–54; Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, ‘Revisiting the apparatus: the theatre chair and cinematic spectatorship’, Screen, vol. 57, no. 3 (2016), pp. 257–67; and Szczepaniak-Gillece, The Optical Vacuum. 101 Ben Schlanger, ‘The floor and the screen’, Motion Picture Projectionist, December 1932, p. 19. 102 Schlanger, ‘Motion picture theatres of tomorrow’, pp. 13, 56. 103 B. Schlanger, ‘Method of enlarging the visual field of the motion picture’, JSMPE, vol. 30, no. 5 (1938), p. 506. 104 R. B. Hunter, ‘Combining dimmer units for increased flexibility’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 1 August 1931, p. 14. 105 Ibid., p. 82. See also ‘The Clavilux’, Motion Picture News, 1 December 1928, pp. 1668, 1670; Douglas Fox, ‘Symphonies of color’, Exhibitors Herald-World, Better Theatres section, 13 April 1929, pp. 20–21; ‘Notes on equipment of the Los Angeles theatre’, Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, 14 February 1931, pp. 30, 32; B. S. Burke, ‘Play color symphonies on “color console”’, Motion Picture Projectionist, April 1931, pp. 23–24; Andrew Robert Johnston, ‘The color of Prometheus: Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia and the projection of transcendence’, in Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (eds), Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 67–78. 106 Ross Melnick, American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 14. On Rothafel’s use of light in conjunction with film projection, see also Paul, When Movies Were Theater, p. 249; ‘New recognition for Roxy as authority on stage design’, Motion Picture News, 5 October 1929, p. 1238; Fairfax Downey, ‘The master of light’, Popular Mechanics, November 1928, pp. 779, 781. 107 Schlanger, ‘Method of enlarging the visual field of the motion picture’, p. 506. 108 Schlanger, ‘Motion picture auditorium lighting’, pp. 262–63, 263. 109 Ibid., pp. 263–64. 110 ‘The accomplishments of Ben Schlanger, architect’, in Theatre Catalog 1953–1954, 11th edn (Philadelphia, PA: Jay Emanuel, 1953), p. xxviii, Theatre Historical Society of America Archives. 111 Paul, ‘The aesthetics of emergence’, p. 335. On the RCA Synchro Screen and its relation to both Schlanger’s career and widescreen cinema, see Szczepaniak-Gillece, The Optical Vacuum, pp. 85–121. 112 Schlanger, ‘Method of enlarging the visual field of the motion picture’, p. 507. 113 See Le Corbusier, ‘Twentieth century building and twentieth century living’ (1930), in Max Risselada (ed.), Raumplan versus Plan Libre (Delft: Delft University Press, 1987), p. 146, and László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Light-architecture’, Industrial Arts, vol. 1, no. 1 (1936), pp. 15–17. On Schlanger’s relation to architectural modernism, see Szczepaniak-Gillece, The Optical Vacuum, pp. 27–29. 114 Paul, When Movies Were Theater, p. 241. 115 See Ralph Walker, ‘The birth of an idea’ and Fred Waller, ‘Cinerama goes to war’, both in Martin Quigley, Jr (ed.), New Screen Techniques (New York, NY: Quigley, 1953), pp. 112–17, 119–26; Fred Waller, ‘The archeology of Cinerama’, Film History, vol. 5, no. 3 (1993), pp. 289–97; Ralph G. Martin, ‘Mr Cinerama’, True, August 1953, p. 88; Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 99–100. 116 Walker, ‘The birth of an idea’, p. 113. 117 Ibid., p. 114. 118 Waller, ‘The archeology of Cinerama’, pp. 290–91, and Waller, ‘Cinerama goes to war’, p. 121. 119 Fred Waller and Ralph Walker of the Vitarama Corporation, Motion Picture Theater, US Patent 2,280,206, filed 14 September 1937 and issued 21 April 1942. 120 Walker, ‘The birth of an idea’, p. 116; Waller, ‘Cinerama goes to war’, p. 121; Waller, ‘The archeology of Cinerama’, p. 291; Fred Waller, ‘The Waller flexible gunnery trainer’, JSMPE, vol. 47, no. 1 (1946), pp. 73–74; Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 85–112; Giles Taylor, ‘A military use for widescreen cinema: training the body through immersive media’, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 72 (2013), pp. 17–32. 121 Waller, ‘The archeology of Cinerama’, p. 297, fn. 1. 122 See Belton, Widescreen Cinema, pp. 85–89. 123 ‘The world’s largest screen’, Motion Picture Projectionist, November 1932, p. 4, and Mordaunt Hall, ‘New RKO Roxy opens with an unusually interesting stage show and an excellent picture’, The New York Times, 30 December 1932, p. 14. 124 A. Gillett, H. Chretien, and J. Tedesco, ‘Panoramic screen projection equipment used at the Palace of Light at the International Exposition (Paris 1937)’, JSMPE, vol. 32, no. 5 (1939), pp. 530–34. 125 See R. A. Klune to Mr. Selznick, 12 May 1939, folder 2: Special Effects: Gone with the Wind file, Ronald Haver Collection, MHL; Ronald Haver, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood (New York, NY: Knopf, 1980), p. 292; Clarence W. D. Slifer, ‘Creating visual effects for G.W.T.W.’, American Cinematographer, August 1982, p. 838; Belton, Widescreen Cinema, p. 100; Alan David Vertrees, Selznick’s Vision: Gone with the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 73. 126 See Paul, When Movies Were Theater, p. 271. 127 László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p. 41, and Elcott, ‘Rooms of our time’, p. 35. 128 K. Lönberg-Holm, ‘New theatre architecture in Europe’, Architectural Record, May 1930, p. 494, and Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 241. 129 Turner, The Democratic Surround, pp. 9, 77–113. 130 For an elaboration of this argument, see Ariel Rogers, ‘“Taking the plunge”: the new immersive screens’, in Campe, Casetti and Buckley (eds), The Excessive Screen. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Screen practices and Hollywood cinema in the 1930s
JO - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjz008
DA - 2019-06-01
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