journal of visual culture - USC DBLABdblab.usc.edu/Users/csci599/friedberg-automotive-1.pdf · 2006-10-09 · This ontological reversal is symptomatic of much of Baudrillard’s cultural

Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of LosAngeles – endless cinema or private telematics

Anne Friedberg

Automotive visuality

As Reyner Banham (1971) noted at the beginning of his now classic study of LosAngeles, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies:

... like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselvesItalian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to readLos Angeles in the original. (p. 23)

The metropolitan logic of Los Angeles can only be understood through its requisiteautomotive mobility; the imbricated histories of Los Angeles and the automobile

journal of visual culture

journal of visual cultureCopyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol 1(2): 183-204 [1470-4129(200208)1:2;183-204;025251]

AbstractThis essay began as a portion of a book project which explores the trope of thewindow – both architectural and metaphoric – and its relation to a framedvisuality. In the book, I consider screens – the film screen, the TV screen, thecomputer screen – as component pieces of architecture, ‘virtual windows’ whichrender the wall permeable to light and ‘ventilation’ in new ways, and whichdramatically change the materialities (and – perhaps more radically – thetemporalities) of built space. This essay discusses how the post-war moviescreens of Los Angeles negotiated the materiality and mobility of the driver andthe immateriality and stasis of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspectratio of the film screen coincided with the panorama of the ‘wraparound’windshield as well as with the horizontal urban sprawl of a growing LosAngeles.

Key words automotive visuality ● mobility ● screen ● spectatorship ● window ● windshield

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weave an explanatory logic to its urban sprawl. ‘Autopia’ – the optimistic pundeployed by one of the opening rides at Disneyland in 1955 – became one ofBanham’s ‘Four Ecologies’ (1971) and, he argued, the automotive experience ofurban space ‘prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes’(p. 214).1 This essay explores the effects of automobility – its combination of urbanmobility and automotive visuality – and its relation to the virtual mobilities ofcinematic and televisual spectatorship.

The automobile is a viewing machine, moving individuals – or, as one of mystudents coined in a punning parapraxis, ‘indi-visuals’ – through urban space(Hertenstein, 1997). Driving is a motorized form of flânerie, and the driver replaysthe urban fluidity of the pedestrian whose itinerary was determined by boulevards,alleys, passageways. The drive can avail itself of the potentials of psycho-geographical drift, the situationist derive. Driving transforms the mobilizedpedestrian gaze with new kinetics of motored speed and with the privatization of theautomobile ‘capsule’ sealed off from the public and the street. But the visuality ofdriving is the visuality of the windshield, operating as a framing device. (Of course,one is also sometimes a passenger, and the side windows and vents of anautomobile frame the view of the scenery, somewhat differently, en passant.)

As Los Angeles grew into a mobile metropolis, much of its vernacular architecturewas built for the driver’s view. Buildings became signage, scenic attractionsdesigned to lure motorists from their cars. Seen through the windshield or carwindow, Los Angeles unfolds as a narrativized screen space, obeying a spectatorial

journal of visual culture 1(2)184

Figure 1 ‘I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original’, Banham (1971: 23).

logic determined by the topography of the freeway and its off-ramp, the boulevardand its alley, the winding hill drive and its rare vista.

Paul Virilio (1988) – in a stroke of declamatory certitude – has made the bluntequation between automotive mobility and cinematic visuality, proclaiming: ‘Whatgoes on in the windshield is cinema in the strict sense’ (p. 188).2 To Jean Baudrillard– another French interlocutor in this automotive discourse – the frame of thewindshield is absent from his account of the city and the cinema screen. In America(1988a), Baudrillard constructs a rhetorical equation between the freeway’s relationto the city and the screen’s relation to reality:

The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it looks as thoughthe metropolis has actually been built around this arterial network. It is thesame with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, buteverything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screenin mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen. (p. 55)

This ontological reversal is symptomatic of much of Baudrillard’s cultural analysis,on a par with the frequently cited founding Baudrillardianism – that soundbite ofthe hyperreal:

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the restis real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are nolonger real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (Baudrillard,1988b: 172)

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality 185

Figure 2 Dennis Hopper, ‘Double Standard’, 1967. Permission of the artist. Courtesy ofCraig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

Inverting the relationship between American urban space and the cinema screen,Baudrillard (1988a) argues that the cinema – its spectatorial mobilities, itssimulated visualities – are not restricted to the screen but extend outward into oururban reflexes. ‘The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies’,he writes:

To grasp its secret, you should not then begin with the city and move inwardstowards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwardstowards the city. (p. 56)

Los Angeles provides an important case study in this regard. The windshield is the permeable membrane between Los Angeles and its screens. In another essay,Baudrillard (1983) described the ‘private telematics’ of driving where: ‘The vehiclebecomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscapeunfolding like a televised screen’ (p. 77). If Los Angeles itself is an endless cinema screen seen through the windshield or a private television tuned to a channel of vision determined by the driver’s grasp on the steering wheel, then how does the architecture of the Los Angeles movie theatre – the palace, the drive-in, the multiplex – provide a frame for the virtual mobility of cinemaspectatorship?

Implicit here is a key and recurrent theoretical tangle: the tension between thematerial reality of built space and the dematerialized imaginary that the cinema hasalways provided. Cinematic spectatorship evinces twin paradoxes: (1) betweenmateriality and immateriality (of cinematic space); and (2) between mobility andstasis (mobility of images, stasis of spectator). I explored this second paradox in mydiscussion of the development of a mobilized yet virtual gaze in my book, WindowShopping (1993). The cinema provided a virtual mobility for its spectators,producing the illusion of transport to other places and times, but it did so within theconfines of a frame. Hence as the mobilized gaze became more virtual, it grew toinvolve less physical mobility and relied more on its frame.

Paul Virilio (1989) has elsewhere described this paradoxical relation in vehicularterms. Thinking of the spectator as a ‘sedentary’ driver, he describes the‘audiovisual vehicle’, an evolutionary mutation of the (dynamic) automotivevehicle.3 The audiovisual vehicle, for Virilio, is a ‘static vehicle’. Figure 3illustrates this evolution: a steam locomotive speeds past in the night as twosedentary viewers watch the film SkyTaxi in which an airplane soars through abrightly lit virtual sky, seen through the windshield of a parked automobile.

In what follows, I explore the intersection between urban mobility and automotivevisuality (i.e. its materiality and mobility) by examining the screen – its format, itsarchitectural context, its implied spectator (i.e. its immateriality and stasis). Duringthe post-war years, the size, format and location of the cinema screen was set intofierce competition with the size, format and location of the television console.Whereas the 10”–12” television screen was tailored to the domestic scale of thehome, movie theaters competed by differentiating their offerings with color, 3D andwider screen formats. Drive-in ‘roofless theaters’ or ‘ozoners’ catered to themobility and domestic encapsulation of the automotive spectator; while ‘four-


walled’ or ‘hard-top’ theaters introduced Widescreen and Cinerama™ formats tocompensate for what the small black and white screens of television could notsupply. The protocols of cinema and televisual spectatorship changed as did thearchitectural and spatial positioning of the screen.

The screen

So: let’s begin with the screen. While the filmic representation of architecturalspace and the work of architects on film decor and mise en scène have – so far –been the predominant manner in which architecture and cinema have been cojoined,a theory of film spectatorship that describes the shifting views of the spectatorengaged in an imaginary and virtual mobility, relies on a different concept of thespace of the cinema – one that emphasizes the relation between the bodily spaceinhabited by the spectator and the visuality presented by the space of the screen (seeFigure 4).4

The photograph in Figure 4 of S. Charles Lee’s downtown Los Angeles moviepalace – the Los Angeles Theater built in 1931 – illustrates the ‘classical’ screenformat with an aspect of 1.33:1. This format with a basic 4:3 (width to height)aspect was the screen format established in 1906 as an international standard forfilm width and projection.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, each of a blank and yet luminous cinema screen,


Figure 3 O. Winston Link, ‘Hot Shot Eastbound’, West Virginia, 2 August 1956. Reproducedwith the permission of the O. Winston Link Trust.

help us to visualize the role of the screen itself. For the film spectator, the darknessthat surrounds the frame both minimizes its borders and calls us to play upon itsboundaries. The frame of the screen forms either a tableau-like proscenium, forcingour vision to center its gaze or it implies a continuum of space lingering just off-screen/off-frame. To capture the screen in its luminous blankness, Sugimotoused an extended exposure time, holding his aperture open so long that the screenedimages vanish; leaving only the projection light of an empty white screen to cast aneerie glow on the architecture of the movie theater. Sugimoto’s screens exposetime.5 Cinema spectatorship, as one of its essential features, has always producedexperiences that are not temporally fixed. Its spectators not only engage in the fluidtemporalities of cinematic construction – flashbacks, ellipses, a-chronologies – butalso engage in time frames other than the spectator’s moment in historical time. Thecinema, as a unique tool of modernity, freed its spectators from the bindings ofmaterial space but it could also cast its viewers free from the binds of time.

Sugimoto’s photographs return us to the tension between the bodily stasis of thecinematic spectator and the virtual mobilities presented on the screen. What are thespaces the spectator traverses in order to arrive at a seat in front of this screen? Inhis short piece ‘En sortant du cinéma/Leaving the cinema’, Roland Barthes (1980)described the acts of entering/exiting the movie theater.6 Entering, the subject isdrawn from street to street, poster to poster, to ‘abandon himself into ananonymous, indifferent cube of darkness’ (p. 1). In this way, the cinema screenbecomes the endpoint of an urban itinerary, a final destination or restful respite for


Figure 4 Hiroshi Sugimoto, the Los Angeles Theater (1993). By permission of the artist.

the footsore flâneur. Barthes compares the ‘urban darkness’ of the movie theater tothe ‘opposite experience’ of the television viewer where the space is ‘familiar,organized ... tamed’ (p. 2). Before we examine this opposition of cinematic andtelevisual spectatorship, let me briefly return to some debates from the 1920s and1930s about how architectural space contributes to the spectator effect.

Siegfried Kracauer (1926) supplied one answer in his now-well-known FrankfurterZeitung article, ‘The Cult of Distraction’, about the picture palaces of Berlindesigned by Hans Poelzig. To Kracauer, the architectural context of the film screenin these ‘optical fairylands’ (p. 323) undermined the potential power of the filmitself. Kracauer argued that the architecture of the theater ‘deprived the film of itsrights’ (p. 328) and undercut what was on the screen, drawing it into a unity, agesamtkunstwerk of surface splendor.7 To Kracauer, movie theater architecture wasnot about the screen, but everything else.

While Kracauer’s cranky reaction to the ornate decor of the movie palace may havebeen at odds with a movie-going public that took as much comfort in architecturalhyperbole as they did from screen spectacle, his critique was consistent with thearchitectural urge for modern functionalism found in the work of architects likeViennese-born Frederick Kiesler. For Kiesler, the movie theater required newdesigns. ‘Present day cinema or motion picture houses’, Kiesler wrote in 1928, ‘arenot cinemas, but merely imitations of old European theatres into which a screen washung’ (p. 36). Previous theater architecture (and Poelzig was a prime example) was,to Kiesler, ‘stuck fast in decoration’ (p. 36). Kiesler’s 1928 design for the Film


Figure 5 Frederick Kiesler, Film Guild Theater, New York (1928).

Guild Theater in New York (see Figure 5) was ‘designed solely for the projection ofthe cinema’ (p. 16).

Figure 5 shows how ‘to concentrate the public’s attention on the screen, movingdiaphragms were installed in front of it. These were called “screen-o-scope”. Thediaphragms give to the curved screen behind them any shape and size’ (p. 17).

As Kiesler argued in ‘Building a Cinema Theatre’ (1929):

The most important quality of the auditorium is its power to suggestconcentrated attention and at the same time to destroy the sensation ofconfinement that may occur easily when the spectator concentrates on thescreen.

The spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless spaceeven though the screen implies the opposite....

The first radical step toward the creation of an ideal cinema is the abolition ofthe proscenium and all other stage platforms’ resemblance to the theatre....My invention, the screen-o-scope, takes the place of these theatrical elementsand supplies a new method of opening the screen which eliminates curtains.The interior lines of the theatre must focalize to the screen compellingunbroken attention on the spectator. (pp. 16–18, emphasis added)

Kiesler’s plan – with walls and ceiling and adjustable main screen as projectionsurfaces – while never fully realized, was for a theater that surrounded the spectatorwith filmed images; an imaginary, endless space.8


Figure 6 Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Studio Drive-In’ (1993), Culver City. Reproduced bypermission of the artist.

An imaginary, endless space: metropolitan Los Angeles? Certainly, in contrast toNew York and Berlin, Los Angeles was a site where spectator/driver positions wereconstantly negotiated. Post-war Los Angeles had to contend with two remarkabletransformations to domestic public and private life – the automobile and television.And both had profound effects on the screen.

The screens in Figures 6 and 7 exemplify the post-war changes to the size, formatand location of the screen. (Note the wider screen format in Figure 6 of the StudioDrive-in and the 2.75:1 Cinerama format in Figure 7 of the Cinerama Dome.)

The automobile

After the hardships of the depression, and after curtailed wartime production andgas rationing, post-war automobile ownership increased exponentially. Thearchitectural expansion of post-war Los Angeles continued to build for automobilesand their drivers: drive-in restaurants, auto-court motels, supermarkets, cardealerships, bowling alleys, car washes, gas stations, coffee shops and drive-intheaters (Longstreth, 1998, 2000). Facades meant to lure car customers alsorequired parking to accommodate them.

The automobile had already begun to have effects on the movie-goer. To return toVirilio’s (1989) term for the ‘audiovisual vehicle’ – the ‘static vehicle’ – in all itsimmateriality required that the materiality of the automobile be dealt with.Spectatorship – if it is a radical metaphor for the windshield – required the sheddingof the automotive ‘capsule’, i.e. parking. Figure 9 illustrates a Los Angeles areatheater (the Fox Florence, 1931) which offered its customers a ‘Free Auto ParkEntrance’ (far right) – a marquee entrance for drivers.


Figure 7 Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Cinerama Dome’ (1993), Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood.Reproduced by permission of the artist.


Figure 9 S. Charles Lee, Fox Florence Theater, 1931.

Figure 8 Margaret Bourke-White, There’s no way like the American Way, Louisville, KY,1937. Courtesy of Life Magazine.

Television

The commercial introduction of television in 1948 produced what was called, in thepopular press, ‘the Lost Audience’. In the years between 1947 and 1957, movieattendance dropped by one half and 90 percent of the American population acquireda television. More than 4000 ‘four-walled’ theaters closed between 1946 and 1956.As if to lure these missing masses, there was a compensatory balance in theconstruction of ‘roofless’ theaters – drive-ins (see Taylor, 1956: 100–2; Austin,1985: 59–91; Gomery, 1992: 91–3).9 As Eric Johnson, president of the MotionPicture Association of America, declared in 1952: ‘Drive-ins more than make-up forthe total seats lost through the closedown of theaters.’10

At the same time, the 1948 Supreme Court decision on the anti-trust suit U.S. vs.Paramount Pictures, Inc et al. ruled that the ‘Big Five’ movie studios had to divestthemselves of their theater holdings; the ‘Divestiture Decision’ effectively separatedfilm production from exhibition. The film industry – its producers and exhibitorsnow divorced from each other and operating sometimes at cross-purposes – had twostrategies to combat the commercial introduction of television. One was tocompromise – by adjusting to the spectatorial advantages of television11 – and theother to compensate – by offering screen size, color images and the immersivespectatorship that television could not supply.

The rhetorical campaign to counter the threat of television is exemplified by theadvertising campaign designed to contrast the discomforts of television stay-at-home viewing with the compensations of ‘going out’. This campaign, mounted by aLos Angeles-based publicity company ‘Hallmark of Hollywood’, extolled thevirtues of screen size (the gigantism of 330 times!) and the ‘fresh air’ respite ofleaving the domestic confinement of ‘4-walls’. (A strategy with a touch of ironyonly because these very theaters which represented leaving the ‘4-walls’ of homefor ‘fresh air’ were referred to in the trades as ‘4-wallers’ not ‘ozoners’.)

The ad in Figure 10 boasts:

GOING OUT, going to the show – is real fun! ... OUR GIANT screenprovides a wonderful picture with perfect sound. It’s 330 times bigger thanthe largest TV screen. TO GO OUT, to get away from those 4-walls, the eye-strain, those screaming commercials – is indeed a treat.

The image in Figure 11 relies on the horizontal sprawl of Joanne Woodward (withLee J. Cobb lurking behind) in a still from the 1957 Cinemascope (2.35:1 formatted)Three Faces of Eve. A tiny TV set contains the same image pitifully cropped with a small ‘21 inch’ arrow measuring its size. The TV seems to radiate a haze ofbenday (screen) dots: a barking dog, some fighting children, a crawling baby, awoman clutching bills and an armchair-ridden man – all bespectacled (including thedog) no doubt due to eyestrain – a cartoon of suffering produced by the shrunkenscreen.

Captioned ‘SHRINK ’EM’, the ad copy proclaims:

The NEW SHOW SEASON is here! They’re wide-screen and mostly in


glorious, natural color. These wonderful shows can never be de-colorized andshrunk to fill gaps between screamin’ commercials on little pea-shaped TVscreens.

HALLMARK of Hollywood will pay $50,000 to ‘the genius’ who cansqueeze any one of these new, Big Hits down to TV-size without ruining thisfine entertainment!

NO ONE CAN SQUEEZE IT 330 TIMES!

In smaller print, the ad quantifies quality:

Think of it! This theatre’s Giant Screen is more than 330 times larger than anyTV set in town. Sitting home, you’re missing 96% of the wonderful quality ofany film! Get out, breathe the fresh air, get away from those 4-walls!

At this theatre, you’ll find no beer cans ... no poor lighting ... no distortedsound ... You’ll suffer no eye strain ... no telephones ringing ... no screams,


Figure 10 ‘Up to 330 Times Bigger ... and Better’ from ‘Hallmark of Hollywood’ publicitycampaign. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts andSciences, Los Angeles.

squawks or arguments ... There’ll be no interruptions of your relaxation byyacking ‘pitchmen’: ... no shallow greys, no fades, no flips, no snow ordistracting shivering lines. You’ll be in a different world – of beautiful color –comfortable, completely and emotionally relaxed.

When you wish to Relax GO OUT TO A MOVIE! (emphasis added)12

The drive-in

‘Get out, breathe the fresh air, get away from those 4-walls!’ – the drive-in. Thedrive-in catered to post-war demographics – families with small children, teenagers,population migration to the suburbs – while at the same time providing acompromise between the giant screen, the ‘going out’ factor of public exhibition,and the domestic hermeticism of the private car. The wide screen of the windshieldfits the view of the whole family.

The drive-in spectators eating pizza behind the windshield in Figure 12 seem to


Figure 11 ‘SHRINK ’EM’ from ‘Hallmark of Hollywood’ publicity campaign. Courtesy ofMargaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

answer the foodline in Margaret Bourke-White’s ironic visual epigram from 1937.Drive-ins not only supplied copious concessions for spectators along with theirother attractions for pre-dusk family entertainments – playgrounds, miniature golf,pony rides, miniature trains – but also supplied concessions for cars themselves –gasoline and windshield cleaning.

Called ‘ozoners’, drive-ins provided outdoor film exhibition and their weather-dependent viewing could be year round in southern California. Most important,


Figure 12 Washington Post and Times Herald, 1955. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library,Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

Figure 13 ‘Drive-In Theater’ patent diagram, R.M. Hollingshead Jr, 16 May 1933. Fromcollection of the author.

however, for the drive-in theater spectator the screen must be visible through thewindshield. As the parking lot replaced theater seats, cars needed to be arranged tosolve problems of sightlines and viewing angles. Windshield-to-screen sightlineswere solved by parking cars on angled ramps facing toward concave screens,positioning cars in succeeding rows so that the screen was visible from each car.This idea was patented by a New Jersey exhibitor Richard Hollingshead in 1933(see Figure 13). Hollingshead formed a company, Park-In Theaters, Inc., which soldblueprints and franchises of his patent which included (1) a ‘clamshell’ shaped lot,(2) terraced parking rows, and (3) earthen ramps to tilt cars to proper sightlineelevation.13

Hollingshead’s schematic drawing shows how parked cars needed to be tilted at anangle sufficient for all occupants to see the screen over the car in front.

In 1934, California’s first – the nation’s second – drive-in opened in Los Angeles.The marquee for the Pico Drive-in (Figure 14) demonstrates the importantcomponents of drive-in spectatorship: (1) ‘sit in your car’; (2) ‘see and hear’; and(3) the hyperbole (‘world’s largest’) of screen size.

Of course, there were problems other than sightlines that needed to be overcome foroutdoor exhibition to work. There were sound problems: the first drive-ins ‘blasted’their sound with RCA Victor loudspeakers. Post-war drive-ins solved the soundproblem with In-Car speakers (developed in 1941) wired and connected toindividual posts. There were luminance problems: drive-ins required long-throwprojectors with powerful arc lamps. Despite bright projection, drive-in exhibition


Figure 14 Pico Drive-In, 1934.

could only begin after dusk, when it was dark enough outside, effectively limitingthe number of screenings daily. But the sightline problems between windshield and screen required careful adjustment. The screen needed to be seen through the windshield, but also from the rear seat. Drive-in screens which were 40–60 feet wide might fill the entire windshield. The images in Figure 15, from a 1948 article by an engineer for Park-In Theatres who specialized in improvedsightlines, demonstrate these difficulties. The figure on the left was captioned:‘Photograph taken through the windshield from the rear end with the car parked inthe second ramp’, while the figure on the right claimed: ‘Same view, with carparked in third ramp’ (Taylor, 1948).

Cinerama

While the drive-in combined automotive mobility and cinematic visuality andcatered to television’s domestic comforts, the ‘four-walled’ ‘hardtop’ theaters had torely on other strategies to retain cinematic spectators. Cinerama was one suchinvention.

Cinerama was developed for the military during wartime and used by the Air Forceas training for gunners in simulated combat conditions. Pioneered by inventor FredWaller, financed by Laurence Rockefeller and promoted by business partner radiocommentator Lowell Thomas, Cinerama had its first commercial demonstration in1952 with the feature-length travelogue This is Cinerama. Using a 3-lens camera, 3projectors, 6-track recording and 6–12 loudspeakers, the film was projected onto aconcave screen, 146 degrees wide. As the editor of the Better Theaters section ofMotion Picture Herald declared after the This is Cinerama preview: ‘Cinerama isan expansion of the theatre’s motion picture, as televised films are a contraction ofit’ (Schutz, 1952).

Cinerama was not the first multiple-camera/projector system; Raoul GrimoinSanson’s 10-projector panoramic screen, the Cinéorama which debuted at the Paris


Figure 15 Windshield sightlines and visibility demonstrated by Herbert S. Taylor in theJournal of Society of Motion Picture Engineers (April 1948). Courtesy of Margaret HerrickLibrary, Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

1900 Exposition and Abel Gance’s 3-projector PolyVision for his 1927 filmNapoleon were other indications of the urge to widen the screen format. Cineramawas only one of several subsequent and more successful screen formats –Cinemascope (1953), TODD-A-O (1954) and VistaVision (1955) – designed topresent an immersive illusion of depth with screens wide enough to fill peripheralvision (Belton, 1992). As one Cinerama ad boasted: ‘You won’t be gazing at amovie screen. You’ll find yourself swept right into the picture.’

Eleven years after Cinerama’s first debut, a new theater opened in Hollywood, thefirst new theater built in Hollywood for 30 years (Figure 17). Financed by PacificDrive-In Theaters – who had built 38 outdoor cinemas in and around Los Angeles –the Cinerama Dome was a ‘four-walled’ ‘hardtop’ theater of a different sort. Built in17 weeks, builders raced through a whirlwind 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-weekconstruction schedule to meet its planned opening on 7 November 1963 for the galapremiere of Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World! (Although thestructure was named for Cinerama, A Mad Mad Mad Mad World! was filmed andprojected in a different process – UltraPanaVision with a single 70mm projectorwith anamorphic lens: 2.75:1.)14

The Los Angeles-based architectural firm of Welton Becket & Associates designedthe Dome, hiring a firm of structural engineers to help adapt the geodesic principlesof R. Buckminster Fuller. Welton Becket had designed many landmarks of1950s/1960s Los Angeles: the Capitol Records Building (1954); the Beverly HiltonHotel (1955); the ‘Theme Building’ at Los Angeles International Airport (1963);and the downtown Music Center 1964–9.15


Figure 16 Cinerama diagram, from This is Cinerama publicitybrochure, 1955. From collection of author.

The Cinerama Dome became an instant landmark. It was the first geodesic domebuilt of concrete, fitting 316 hexagonal and pentagonal panels in 16 different sizesinto 35 different configurations of reinforced steel (see Figure 17). (Becketconcurrently designed the dome for the General Electric Pavilion at the 1964 NewYork World’s Fair.) The 52-foot high, 140-foot diameter dome vaulted the space fora ‘wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling’ 74 by 32-foot screen. The Cinerama Dome was tobe a prototype for several hundred other Cineramas to be built in the US andabroad, but as Cinerama films were expensive to produce and exhibit, this dream ofexpansion did not occur.16

Los Angeles’s continued and future reliance on automobility was insured whenPacific Electric’s Red Car lines were discontinued in 1961. The Cinerama Domewas purpose-built for the automotive spectator: it had ample parking (seating for1000 and parking for 400 cars). By 1964, Los Angeles was the second mostpopulous city in the nation. It had 3.2 million cars. On the outside, the CineramaDome was – and remains – a roadside attraction for the driver. Although the insidescreen may seem to have nothing to do with automobile culture or with catering tothe mobility of its post-war audience, the Cinerama screen unfolds its aspect ratio ina horizontal expanse; it fills the view like a windshield.

The post-war screens of Los Angeles – both the drive-in and the Cinerama Dome –brandished their size and their out-of-house locations to challenge the shrunkenindoor screens of television. Both negotiated the materiality and mobility of the


Figure 17 Cinerama Dome, The Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1963. Courtesy ofMargaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

driver – the need to park the vehicle – in order to reach the immateriality and stasisof the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect ratio of the film screencoincided with the panorama of the ‘wraparound’ windshield as well as with thehorizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los Angeles. If the skyscraper – like itsprecursors the cathedral spire and the clocktower – was an architectural monumentto aspiration, then the widescreen windshield seems to answer another somewhatdifferent desire: immersion in an imaginary, endless space.

Notes

1. Autopia remains the only original Tomorrowland attraction left from this originalDisneyland 1955 opening. Junior Autopia opened in Fantasyland in 1956, closed in 1958and then reopened in 1959 as Fantasyland Autopia.

2. Margaret Crawford (1991) also compares automotive visuality with another screenmedium, television: ‘Like television, another individualized medium, the automobiledistances us from the world outside our sealed capsule while restructuring andabstracting it’ (p. 227).

3. Extract from Virilio (1989):

If in fact the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth experiencedthe advent of the automotive vehicle, the dynamic vehicle of the railroad, the street, andthen the air, then the end of this century seems to herald the next vehicle, the audiovisualone, a final mutation: static vehicle, substitute for the change of physical location, andextension of domestic intertia, a vehicle that ought at last to bring about the victory ofsedentariness. (pp. 108–9)

4. For discussions of architecture in the frame of the movie, of set design and mise en scène,see Barsacq (1978), Albrecht (1987), Neumann (1996), Corliss and Clarens (1991) andCinema and Architecture (1991). Other recent accounts of the relationship betweencinema and architecture explore the representation of the space of the city. See Penz andThomas (1997) and Dimendberg (forthcoming).

5. See Kellein (1995). Sugimoto’s photographic studies of wax museums, dioramas, theaterinteriors and drive-in theaters vividly play with the temporal fixity of the fixedphotographic image.

6. Roland Barthes’ short piece ‘En sortant du cinéma’ appeared in the famous issue ofCommunications 23 (1975) and was translated by Bertrand Augst and Susan White inApparatus (1980).

7. Kracauer (1995[1926]) decreed that the movie theater should be free of all trappings that‘deprive film of its rights ... to ... a kind of distraction which exposes disintegrationinstead of masking it’ (p. 328).

8. Kiesler (1929): Kiesler’s design called for still and moving pictures to be shown on thewalls and ceiling as well as on the main screen which could be adjusted in size andshape. The theater’s walls and ceiling sloped toward the front screen and were coveredwith black material designed as projection screens. Kiesler had designed specialmachines to project onto a black surface. The Film Guild Cinema was described in anarticle in the special ‘Better Theatres’ section of Exhibitor’s Herald-World (see Fox,1929). Kiesler was not the only architect to argue against the distracting ornamentationof the movie palace and for the immersion of the spectator. In 1933, A.V. Pilichowskiwrote in the pages of the English language film journal, Close Up:

What seems required for a cinema to be truly cinematic is a more immediate contactbetween the screen and the audience. My suggestion is for a panoramic screen; the ideabeing that the screen should encircle the audience and thus make it part of a completesystem. Mobile multiple projectors would throw pictures on the screen, the action being


started at one end and terminated at the other. Visibility would not be required to be perfectfrom every seat at the same time, a certain element of interest being aroused by hiding,revealing, and hiding again the picture as it sweeps around the screen. (p. 69)

9. I would also like to acknowledge an excellent essay on drive-in spectatorship that hasjust come to my attention: Morley Cohen (1994).

10. Eric Johnson, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, quoted inBusiness Week, 9 August 1952: 47. Post-war drive-in growth: by the end of the SecondWorld War there were only 300 nationwide, by 1952 there were 3276 nationwide; by1958 nearly 5000. The 1967 Census of Business reported 11,478 theaters in the US, 80944-walls and 3384 drive-ins. Other statistics from Balio (1976) and Gomery (1992).

11. In an early attempt to broker a compromise between the new programming available ontelevision screens and the out-of-the-home theater-going audience, in 1947 and 1948theaters began to have TV viewing lounges, using screens of 15 x 20 feet. AnnaMcCarthy (1995) has explored the role of television outside the domestic arena – thebarstool audience in taverns and the boxing audience for theater television. See alsoMcCarthy (2001).

12. ‘Hallmark of Hollywood’ publicity campaign; clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library,Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

13. R.M. Hollingshead, Patent #1,909,537 for a ‘Drive-In Theater’ was approved by theUnited States Patent Office on 16 May 1993. The Hollingshead patent was later reversedin Federal Circuit Court when his invention was ruled as landscape architecture and notpatentable.

14. Despite claims to the contrary, the Cinerama Dome was not the first theater designedexclusively for Cinerama. The ‘Golden Triangle’ of three mid-western Cooper Cineramaswere the first purpose-built Cinerama theaters – the Denver Cooper which opened inMarch 1961, Minneapolis Cooper in August 1962 and Omaha Cooper in November1962. Before the early 1960s, theaters which were adapted to show Cinerama had to beremodeled, conforming their rectangular floorplans and stadium seating to the newangles of the curved screen.

15. Charles Moore describes the Welton Becket style of the Mark Taper Forum and theDorothy Chandler Pavilion as: ‘Late Imperial Depression Style cake’ (see Moore et al.,1984: 15). Becket died in 1969 yet his firm retained his name after his death. In LosAngeles, both Century City and the Beverly Center bear his name.

16. The original plan for the Cinerama Dome included a 400-room 16-storey hotel toppedwith a glass-enclosed skyroom, two 13-storey office buildings, 1000 feet of commercialshops and retail space. Recent development plans for a $70 million entertainment centerthreatened to puncture the dome for a second-level entry and to reconfigure the seats forstadium seating and to substitute a flat screen. While the Cultural Heritage Commissionof Los Angeles was willing to grant landmark status to the exterior of the dome and themarquee, it took several more months of wrangling between LA Conservancy, Friends ofCinerama and Hollywood Heritage to preserve the Cinerama screen. An agreement wasreached to retain the dome and screen of the Cinerama structure. Construction for theshopping and entertainment center began in mid-2000. The theater temporarily shutdown during the new construction but is scheduled to open again in spring 2002. TheCinerama Dome – which has been closed during new construction – will become thecenterpiece of a three-level entertainment and retail center, featuring 14 additionalscreens in a separate building behind the existing Dome. The Dome itself will berenovated, but will not be chopped up into smaller theaters; the original 86 x 32 footcurved screen will remain intact. The Cinerama Theater was scheduled to reopen andexhibit existing classic Cinerama movies on a louvered screen as the originals wereexhibited. When plans were announced that a single curved screen would be usedinstead, another controversy ensued. See Welkos (2002: A1).


References

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Austin, Bruce A. (1985) ‘The Development and Decline of the Drive-In Movie Theater inCurrent Research’, in Bruce A. Austin (ed.) Film: Audience, Economics, the Law, pp.59–91. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Balio, Tino (ed.) (1976) The American Film Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Banham, Reyner (1971) Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Penguin.Barsacq, Leon (1978) Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film

Design. New York: New American Library.Barthes, Roland (1980) ‘Leaving the Cinema’, in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (ed.) Apparatus,

trans. Bertrand Augst and Susan White, pp. 1–4. New York: Tanam Press.Baudrillard, Jean (1983) ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Hal Foster (ed.) The Anti-

Aesthetic, trans. by John Johnston, pp. 126–34. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.Baudrillard, Jean (1988a) America, trans. Chris Turner. London: VersoBaudrillard, Jean (1988b) ‘Simulations and Simulacra’, in Mark Poster (ed.) Jean

Baudrillard: Selected Writings, pp. 166–84. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Belton, John (1992) Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Cinema and Architecture (1991) Special Issue, IRIS 12.Corliss, Mary and Clarens, Carlos (1991) ‘Designed for Film’ (exhibition catalog). New

York: MOMA. Crawford, Margaret (1991) ‘The Fifth Ecology: Fantasy, the Automobile, and Los Angeles’,

in Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford (eds) The Car and the City: The Automobile, theBuilt Environment, and Daily Urban Life, pp. 222–33. Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress.

Dimendberg, Edward (forthcoming) Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.

Fox, Douglas (1929) ‘The Film Guild Cinema: An Experiment in Theatre Design’,Exhibitor’s Herald-World, 16 March: 15–19.

Friedberg, Anne (1993) Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Gomery, Douglas (1992) Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the UnitedStates. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Hertenstein, Tom (1997) ‘Highways to Nowhere: Space, Speed and Freedom on theElectronic Frontier’, dissertation for ‘Theories of Technology and Visuality’ course, Fall,University of California, Irvine.

Kellein, Thomas (1995) Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Exposed. Stuttgart: Edition Hansjorg Mayer.Kiesler, Frederick J. (1928) ‘100 Per Cent Cinema’, Close Up, August, III(2): 35–41.Kiesler, Frederick J. (1998[1929]) ‘Building a Cinema Theatre’, in Siegfried Gohr and

Gunda Luyken (eds) Frederick J. Kiesler: Selected Writings, 16–18. Stuttgart: VerlagGerd Hatje, 1996. (Reprinted from New York Evening Post, New York, 2 February, 1929:16–19.)

Kracauer, Siegfried (1995[1926]) ‘The Cult of Distraction’, in The Mass Ornament, trans.Thomas Y. Levin, pp. 323–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Longstreth, Richard (1998) City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, andRetailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Longstreth, Richard (2000) The Drive-in, the Supermarket, and the Transformation ofCommercial Space in Los Angeles 1914–1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McCarthy, Anna (1995) ‘“The Front Row is Reserved for Scotch Drinkers”: EarlyTelevision’s Tavern Audience’, Cinema Journal 34(4), Summer: 31–49.

McCarthy, Anna (2001) Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.


Moore, Charles, Becker, Peter and Campbell, Regula (1984) Los Angeles: The CityObserved. New York: Vintage Books.

Morley Cohen, Mary (1994) ‘Forgotten Audiences in the Passion Pits: Drive-In Theatres andChanging Spectator Practices in Post-War America’, Film History 6: 470–86.

Neumann, Dietrich (ed.) (1996) Film Architecture. New York: Prestel Verlag.Penz, François and Thomas, Maureen (eds) (1997) Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-

Stevens, Multimedia. London: British Film Institute.Pilichowski, A.V. (1933) ‘Cinema of the Future’ sketch, Close Up X(1), March: 69, 87–8.Schutz, George (1952) ‘Cinerama and the Future’, Motion Picture Herald, 4 October.Taylor, Frank J. (1956) ‘Big Boom in Outdoor Movies’, Saturday Evening Post, 15

September, 31: 100–2.Taylor, S. Herbert (1948) ‘The Drive-In Theater’, Journal of SMPE 50, April: 337–43.Virilio, Paul (1988[1981]) ‘The Third Window’, translation of an interview in Cahiers du

Cinema (April 1981), in Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (eds) Global Television, pp.185–197. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Virilio, Paul (1989) ‘The Last Vehicle’, in Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (eds)Looking Back on the End of the World, trans. David Antal, Semiotext(e): 106–10.

Welkos, Robert W. (2002) ‘Big Screen Furor-Rama in Hollywood’, Los Angeles Times, 19February: A1.

Anne Friedberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Visual Studies at theUniversity of California, Irvine. She is the author of Window Shopping: Cinema andthe Postmodern (University of California Press, 1993) and co-editor of ananthology of critical and theoretical writing about film, Close Up 1927–1933:Cinema and Modernism (Cassell, 1998). Her current book project, The VirtualWindow: From Alberti to Microsoft, situates the convergence of cinema, televisionand the computer screens within a cultural history of the window as an architecturaland figurative trope.

Address: Program in Film Studies, University of California, Irvine, 235Humanities Instructional Building, Irvine, CA 92697-2435, USA. [email:[email protected]]


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journal of visual culture - USC DBLABdblab.usc.edu/Users/csci599/friedberg-automotive-1.pdf · 2006-10-09 · This ontological reversal is symptomatic of much of Baudrillard’s cultural