Automotive

journal of visual culture

Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of Los Angeles – endless cinema or private telematics Anne Friedberg Abstract

This essay began as a portion of a book project which explores the trope of the window – both architectural and metaphoric – and its relation to a framed visuality. In the book, I consider screens – the film screen, the TV screen, the computer screen – as component pieces of architecture, ‘virtual windows’ which render the wall permeable to light and ‘ventilation’ in new ways, and which dramatically change the materialities (and – perhaps more radically – the temporalities) of built space. This essay discusses how the post-war movie screens of Los Angeles negotiated the materiality and mobility of the driver and the immateriality and stasis of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect ratio of the film screen coincided with the panorama of the ‘wraparound’ windshield as well as with the horizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los Angeles. Key words

automotive visuality mobility screen spectatorship window windshield ●

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Automotive visuality As Reyner Banham (1971) noted at the beginning of his now classic study of Los Angeles, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies: ... like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original. (p. 23) The metropolitan logic of Los Angeles can only be understood through its requisite automotive mobility; the imbricated histories of Los Angeles and the automobile

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

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

weave an explanatory logic to its urban sprawl. ‘Autopia’ – the optimistic pun deployed by one of the opening rides at Disneyland in 1955 – became one of Banham’s ‘Four Ecologies’ (1971) and, he argued, the automotive experience of urban space ‘prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes’ (p. 214).1 This essay explores the effects of automobility – its combination of urban mobility and automotive visuality – and its relation to the virtual mobilities of cinematic and televisual spectatorship. The automobile is a viewing machine, moving individuals – or, as one of my students coined in a punning parapraxis, ‘indi-visuals’ – through urban space (Hertenstein, 1997). Driving is a motorized form of flânerie, and the driver replays the urban fluidity of the pedestrian whose itinerary was determined by boulevards, alleys, passageways. The drive can avail itself of the potentials of psychogeographical drift, the situationist derive. Driving transforms the mobilized pedestrian gaze with new kinetics of motored speed and with the privatization of the automobile ‘capsule’ sealed off from the public and the street. But the visuality of driving 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 an automobile frame the view of the scenery, somewhat differently, en passant.) As Los Angeles grew into a mobile metropolis, much of its vernacular architecture was built for the driver’s view. Buildings became signage, scenic attractions designed to lure motorists from their cars. Seen through the windshield or car window, Los Angeles unfolds as a narrativized screen space, obeying a spectatorial

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

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

logic determined by the topography of the freeway and its off-ramp, the boulevard and its alley, the winding hill drive and its rare vista. Paul Virilio (1988) – in a stroke of declamatory certitude – has made the blunt equation between automotive mobility and cinematic visuality, proclaiming: ‘What goes 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 the windshield is absent from his account of the city and the cinema screen. In America (1988a), Baudrillard constructs a rhetorical equation between the freeway’s relation to the city and the screen’s relation to reality: The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it looks as though the metropolis has actually been built around this arterial network. It is the same with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, but everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in 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 of the hyperreal: Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (Baudrillard, 1988b: 172)

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Inverting the relationship between American urban space and the cinema screen, Baudrillard (1988a) argues that the cinema – its spectatorial mobilities, its simulated visualities – are not restricted to the screen but extend outward into our urban 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 inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards towards 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 vehicle becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding 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 cinema spectatorship? Implicit here is a key and recurrent theoretical tangle: the tension between the material reality of built space and the dematerialized imaginary that the cinema has always provided. Cinematic spectatorship evinces twin paradoxes: (1) between materiality and immateriality (of cinematic space); and (2) between mobility and stasis (mobility of images, stasis of spectator). I explored this second paradox in my discussion of the development of a mobilized yet virtual gaze in my book, Window Shopping (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 the confines of a frame. Hence as the mobilized gaze became more virtual, it grew to involve less physical mobility and relied more on its frame. Paul Virilio (1989) has elsewhere described this paradoxical relation in vehicular terms. Thinking of the spectator as a ‘sedentary’ driver, he describes the ‘audiovisual vehicle’, an evolutionary mutation of the (dynamic) automotive vehicle.3 The audiovisual vehicle, for Virilio, is a ‘static vehicle’. Figure 3 illustrates this evolution: a steam locomotive speeds past in the night as two sedentary viewers watch the film SkyTaxi in which an airplane soars through a brightly lit virtual sky, seen through the windshield of a parked automobile. In what follows, I explore the intersection between urban mobility and automotive visuality (i.e. its materiality and mobility) by examining the screen – its format, its architectural context, its implied spectator (i.e. its immateriality and stasis). During the post-war years, the size, format and location of the cinema screen was set into fierce competition with the size, format and location of the television console. Whereas the 10”–12” television screen was tailored to the domestic scale of the home, movie theaters competed by differentiating their offerings with color, 3D and wider screen formats. Drive-in ‘roofless theaters’ or ‘ozoners’ catered to the mobility and domestic encapsulation of the automotive spectator; while ‘four-

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

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

walled’ or ‘hard-top’ theaters introduced Widescreen and Cinerama™ formats to compensate for what the small black and white screens of television could not supply. The protocols of cinema and televisual spectatorship changed as did the architectural and spatial positioning of the screen.

The screen So: let’s begin with the screen. While the filmic representation of architectural space 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 spectator engaged in an imaginary and virtual mobility, relies on a different concept of the space of the cinema – one that emphasizes the relation between the bodily space inhabited by the spectator and the visuality presented by the space of the screen (see Figure 4).4 The photograph in Figure 4 of S. Charles Lee’s downtown Los Angeles movie palace – the Los Angeles Theater built in 1931 – illustrates the ‘classical’ screen format 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 for film width and projection. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, each of a blank and yet luminous cinema screen,

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

help us to visualize the role of the screen itself. For the film spectator, the darkness that surrounds the frame both minimizes its borders and calls us to play upon its boundaries. The frame of the screen forms either a tableau-like proscenium, forcing our 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, Sugimoto used an extended exposure time, holding his aperture open so long that the screened images vanish; leaving only the projection light of an empty white screen to cast an eerie glow on the architecture of the movie theater. Sugimoto’s screens expose time.5 Cinema spectatorship, as one of its essential features, has always produced experiences that are not temporally fixed. Its spectators not only engage in the fluid temporalities of cinematic construction – flashbacks, ellipses, a-chronologies – but also engage in time frames other than the spectator’s moment in historical time. The cinema, as a unique tool of modernity, freed its spectators from the bindings of material 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 the cinematic spectator and the virtual mobilities presented on the screen. What are the spaces the spectator traverses in order to arrive at a seat in front of this screen? In his 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 is drawn from street to street, poster to poster, to ‘abandon himself into an anonymous, indifferent cube of darkness’ (p. 1). In this way, the cinema screen becomes the endpoint of an urban itinerary, a final destination or restful respite for

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

the footsore flâneur. Barthes compares the ‘urban darkness’ of the movie theater to the ‘opposite experience’ of the television viewer where the space is ‘familiar, organized ... tamed’ (p. 2). Before we examine this opposition of cinematic and televisual spectatorship, let me briefly return to some debates from the 1920s and 1930s about how architectural space contributes to the spectator effect. Siegfried Kracauer (1926) supplied one answer in his now-well-known Frankfurter Zeitung article, ‘The Cult of Distraction’, about the picture palaces of Berlin designed by Hans Poelzig. To Kracauer, the architectural context of the film screen in these ‘optical fairylands’ (p. 323) undermined the potential power of the film itself. Kracauer argued that the architecture of the theater ‘deprived the film of its rights’ (p. 328) and undercut what was on the screen, drawing it into a unity, a gesamtkunstwerk of surface splendor.7 To Kracauer, movie theater architecture was not about the screen, but everything else. While Kracauer’s cranky reaction to the ornate decor of the movie palace may have been at odds with a movie-going public that took as much comfort in architectural hyperbole as they did from screen spectacle, his critique was consistent with the architectural urge for modern functionalism found in the work of architects like Viennese-born Frederick Kiesler. For Kiesler, the movie theater required new designs. ‘Present day cinema or motion picture houses’, Kiesler wrote in 1928, ‘are not cinemas, but merely imitations of old European theatres into which a screen was hung’ (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

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

Guild Theater in New York (see Figure 5) was ‘designed solely for the projection of the cinema’ (p. 16). Figure 5 shows how ‘to concentrate the public’s attention on the screen, moving diaphragms were installed in front of it. These were called “screen-o-scope”. The diaphragms 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 suggest concentrated attention and at the same time to destroy the sensation of confinement that may occur easily when the spectator concentrates on the screen. The spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless space even though the screen implies the opposite.... The first radical step toward the creation of an ideal cinema is the abolition of the proscenium and all other stage platforms’ resemblance to the theatre.... My invention, the screen-o-scope, takes the place of these theatrical elements and supplies a new method of opening the screen which eliminates curtains. The interior lines of the theatre must focalize to the screen compelling unbroken attention on the spectator. (pp. 16–18, emphasis added) Kiesler’s plan – with walls and ceiling and adjustable main screen as projection surfaces – while never fully realized, was for a theater that surrounded the spectator with filmed images; an imaginary, endless space.8

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

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

An imaginary, endless space: metropolitan Los Angeles? Certainly, in contrast to New York and Berlin, Los Angeles was a site where spectator/driver positions were constantly negotiated. Post-war Los Angeles had to contend with two remarkable transformations 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, format and location of the screen. (Note the wider screen format in Figure 6 of the Studio Drive-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 and gas rationing, post-war automobile ownership increased exponentially. The architectural expansion of post-war Los Angeles continued to build for automobiles and their drivers: drive-in restaurants, auto-court motels, supermarkets, car dealerships, bowling alleys, car washes, gas stations, coffee shops and drive-in theaters (Longstreth, 1998, 2000). Facades meant to lure car customers also required parking to accommodate them. The automobile had already begun to have effects on the movie-goer. To return to Virilio’s (1989) term for the ‘audiovisual vehicle’ – the ‘static vehicle’ – in all its immateriality required that the materiality of the automobile be dealt with. Spectatorship – if it is a radical metaphor for the windshield – required the shedding of the automotive ‘capsule’, i.e. parking. Figure 9 illustrates a Los Angeles area theater (the Fox Florence, 1931) which offered its customers a ‘Free Auto Park Entrance’ (far right) – a marquee entrance for drivers.

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

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

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Television The commercial introduction of television in 1948 produced what was called, in the popular press, ‘the Lost Audience’. In the years between 1947 and 1957, movie attendance dropped by one half and 90 percent of the American population acquired a 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 the construction 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 Motion Picture Association of America, declared in 1952: ‘Drive-ins more than make-up for the 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 divest themselves of their theater holdings; the ‘Divestiture Decision’ effectively separated film production from exhibition. The film industry – its producers and exhibitors now divorced from each other and operating sometimes at cross-purposes – had two strategies to combat the commercial introduction of television. One was to compromise – by adjusting to the spectatorial advantages of television11 – and the other to compensate – by offering screen size, color images and the immersive spectatorship that television could not supply. The rhetorical campaign to counter the threat of television is exemplified by the advertising campaign designed to contrast the discomforts of television stay-athome viewing with the compensations of ‘going out’. This campaign, mounted by a Los Angeles-based publicity company ‘Hallmark of Hollywood’, extolled the virtues of screen size (the gigantism of 330 times!) and the ‘fresh air’ respite of leaving the domestic confinement of ‘4-walls’. (A strategy with a touch of irony only because these very theaters which represented leaving the ‘4-walls’ of home for ‘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 screen provides a wonderful picture with perfect sound. It’s 330 times bigger than the largest TV screen. TO GO OUT, to get away from those 4-walls, the eyestrain, those screaming commercials – is indeed a treat. The image in Figure 11 relies on the horizontal sprawl of Joanne Woodward (with Lee 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 of benday (screen) dots: a barking dog, some fighting children, a crawling baby, a woman clutching bills and an armchair-ridden man – all bespectacled (including the dog) no doubt due to eyestrain – a cartoon of suffering produced by the shrunken screen. Captioned ‘SHRINK ’EM’, the ad copy proclaims: The NEW SHOW SEASON is here! They’re wide-screen and mostly in

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

glorious, natural color. These wonderful shows can never be de-colorized and shrunk to fill gaps between screamin’ commercials on little pea-shaped TV screens. HALLMARK of Hollywood will pay $50,000 to ‘the genius’ who can squeeze any one of these new, Big Hits down to TV-size without ruining this fine 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 any TV set in town. Sitting home, you’re missing 96% of the wonderful quality of any 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 distorted sound ... You’ll suffer no eye strain ... no telephones ringing ... no screams,

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

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

squawks or arguments ... There’ll be no interruptions of your relaxation by yacking ‘pitchmen’: ... no shallow greys, no fades, no flips, no snow or distracting 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. The drive-in catered to post-war demographics – families with small children, teenagers, population migration to the suburbs – while at the same time providing a compromise between the giant screen, the ‘going out’ factor of public exhibition, and the domestic hermeticism of the private car. The wide screen of the windshield fits the view of the whole family. The drive-in spectators eating pizza behind the windshield in Figure 12 seem to

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Figure 12 Washington Post and Times Herald, 1955. Courtesy of Margaret 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 their other 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 weatherdependent viewing could be year round in southern California. Most important,

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

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 14 Pico Drive-In, 1934.

however, for the drive-in theater spectator the screen must be visible through the windshield. As the parking lot replaced theater seats, cars needed to be arranged to solve problems of sightlines and viewing angles. Windshield-to-screen sightlines were 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 sold blueprints 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 sightline elevation.13 Hollingshead’s schematic drawing shows how parked cars needed to be tilted at an angle 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 important components 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 for outdoor exhibition to work. There were sound problems: the first drive-ins ‘blasted’ their sound with RCA Victor loudspeakers. Post-war drive-ins solved the sound problem with In-Car speakers (developed in 1941) wired and connected to individual posts. There were luminance problems: drive-ins required long-throw projectors with powerful arc lamps. Despite bright projection, drive-in exhibition

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

could only begin after dusk, when it was dark enough outside, effectively limiting the 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 improved sightlines, demonstrate these difficulties. The figure on the left was captioned: ‘Photograph taken through the windshield from the rear end with the car parked in the second ramp’, while the figure on the right claimed: ‘Same view, with car parked in third ramp’ (Taylor, 1948).

Cinerama While the drive-in combined automotive mobility and cinematic visuality and catered to television’s domestic comforts, the ‘four-walled’ ‘hardtop’ theaters had to rely on other strategies to retain cinematic spectators. Cinerama was one such invention. Cinerama was developed for the military during wartime and used by the Air Force as training for gunners in simulated combat conditions. Pioneered by inventor Fred Waller, financed by Laurence Rockefeller and promoted by business partner radio commentator Lowell Thomas, Cinerama had its first commercial demonstration in 1952 with the feature-length travelogue This is Cinerama. Using a 3-lens camera, 3 projectors, 6-track recording and 6–12 loudspeakers, the film was projected onto a concave screen, 146 degrees wide. As the editor of the Better Theaters section of Motion Picture Herald declared after the This is Cinerama preview: ‘Cinerama is an expansion of the theatre’s motion picture, as televised films are a contraction of it’ (Schutz, 1952). Cinerama was not the first multiple-camera/projector system; Raoul Grimoin Sanson’s 10-projector panoramic screen, the Cinéorama which debuted at the Paris

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

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

1900 Exposition and Abel Gance’s 3-projector PolyVision for his 1927 film Napoleon were other indications of the urge to widen the screen format. Cinerama was only one of several subsequent and more successful screen formats – Cinemascope (1953), TODD-A-O (1954) and VistaVision (1955) – designed to present an immersive illusion of depth with screens wide enough to fill peripheral vision (Belton, 1992). As one Cinerama ad boasted: ‘You won’t be gazing at a movie screen. You’ll find yourself swept right into the picture.’ Eleven years after Cinerama’s first debut, a new theater opened in Hollywood, the first new theater built in Hollywood for 30 years (Figure 17). Financed by Pacific Drive-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 in 17 weeks, builders raced through a whirlwind 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week construction schedule to meet its planned opening on 7 November 1963 for the gala premiere of Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World! (Although the structure was named for Cinerama, A Mad Mad Mad Mad World! was filmed and projected in a different process – UltraPanaVision with a single 70mm projector with anamorphic lens: 2.75:1.)14 The Los Angeles-based architectural firm of Welton Becket & Associates designed the Dome, hiring a firm of structural engineers to help adapt the geodesic principles of R. Buckminster Fuller. Welton Becket had designed many landmarks of 1950s/1960s Los Angeles: the Capitol Records Building (1954); the Beverly Hilton Hotel (1955); the ‘Theme Building’ at Los Angeles International Airport (1963); and the downtown Music Center 1964–9.15

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

The Cinerama Dome became an instant landmark. It was the first geodesic dome built of concrete, fitting 316 hexagonal and pentagonal panels in 16 different sizes into 35 different configurations of reinforced steel (see Figure 17). (Becket concurrently designed the dome for the General Electric Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.) The 52-foot high, 140-foot diameter dome vaulted the space for a ‘wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling’ 74 by 32-foot screen. The Cinerama Dome was to be a prototype for several hundred other Cineramas to be built in the US and abroad, but as Cinerama films were expensive to produce and exhibit, this dream of expansion did not occur.16 Los Angeles’s continued and future reliance on automobility was insured when Pacific Electric’s Red Car lines were discontinued in 1961. The Cinerama Dome was purpose-built for the automotive spectator: it had ample parking (seating for 1000 and parking for 400 cars). By 1964, Los Angeles was the second most populous city in the nation. It had 3.2 million cars. On the outside, the Cinerama Dome was – and remains – a roadside attraction for the driver. Although the inside screen may seem to have nothing to do with automobile culture or with catering to the mobility of its post-war audience, the Cinerama screen unfolds its aspect ratio in a 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 shrunken indoor screens of television. Both negotiated the materiality and mobility of the

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driver – the need to park the vehicle – in order to reach the immateriality and stasis of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect ratio of the film screen coincided with the panorama of the ‘wraparound’ windshield as well as with the horizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los Angeles. If the skyscraper – like its precursors the cathedral spire and the clocktower – was an architectural monument to aspiration, then the widescreen windshield seems to answer another somewhat different desire: immersion in an imaginary, endless space. Notes 1. Autopia remains the only original Tomorrowland attraction left from this original Disneyland 1955 opening. Junior Autopia opened in Fantasyland in 1956, closed in 1958 and then reopened in 1959 as Fantasyland Autopia. 2. Margaret Crawford (1991) also compares automotive visuality with another screen medium, television: ‘Like television, another individualized medium, the automobile distances us from the world outside our sealed capsule while restructuring and abstracting it’ (p. 227). 3. Extract from Virilio (1989): If in fact the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth experienced the advent of the automotive vehicle, the dynamic vehicle of the railroad, the street, and then the air, then the end of this century seems to herald the next vehicle, the audiovisual one, a final mutation: static vehicle, substitute for the change of physical location, and extension of domestic intertia, a vehicle that ought at last to bring about the victory of sedentariness. (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) and Cinema and Architecture (1991). Other recent accounts of the relationship between cinema and architecture explore the representation of the space of the city. See Penz and Thomas (1997) and Dimendberg (forthcoming). 5. See Kellein (1995). Sugimoto’s photographic studies of wax museums, dioramas, theater interiors and drive-in theaters vividly play with the temporal fixity of the fixed photographic image. 6. Roland Barthes’ short piece ‘En sortant du cinéma’ appeared in the famous issue of Communications 23 (1975) and was translated by Bertrand Augst and Susan White in Apparatus (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 disintegration instead of masking it’ (p. 328). 8. Kiesler (1929): Kiesler’s design called for still and moving pictures to be shown on the walls and ceiling as well as on the main screen which could be adjusted in size and shape. The theater’s walls and ceiling sloped toward the front screen and were covered with black material designed as projection screens. Kiesler had designed special machines to project onto a black surface. The Film Guild Cinema was described in an article 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 ornamentation of the movie palace and for the immersion of the spectator. In 1933, A.V. Pilichowski wrote 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 contact between the screen and the audience. My suggestion is for a panoramic screen; the idea being that the screen should encircle the audience and thus make it part of a complete system. Mobile multiple projectors would throw pictures on the screen, the action being

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journal of visual culture 1(2) started at one end and terminated at the other. Visibility would not be required to be perfect from 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 has just come to my attention: Morley Cohen (1994). 10. Eric Johnson, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, quoted in Business Week, 9 August 1952: 47. Post-war drive-in growth: by the end of the Second World War there were only 300 nationwide, by 1952 there were 3276 nationwide; by 1958 nearly 5000. The 1967 Census of Business reported 11,478 theaters in the US, 8094 4-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 on television screens and the out-of-the-home theater-going audience, in 1947 and 1948 theaters began to have TV viewing lounges, using screens of 15 x 20 feet. Anna McCarthy (1995) has explored the role of television outside the domestic arena – the barstool audience in taverns and the boxing audience for theater television. See also McCarthy (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 the United States Patent Office on 16 May 1993. The Hollingshead patent was later reversed in Federal Circuit Court when his invention was ruled as landscape architecture and not patentable. 14. Despite claims to the contrary, the Cinerama Dome was not the first theater designed exclusively for Cinerama. The ‘Golden Triangle’ of three mid-western Cooper Cineramas were the first purpose-built Cinerama theaters – the Denver Cooper which opened in March 1961, Minneapolis Cooper in August 1962 and Omaha Cooper in November 1962. Before the early 1960s, theaters which were adapted to show Cinerama had to be remodeled, conforming their rectangular floorplans and stadium seating to the new angles of the curved screen. 15. Charles Moore describes the Welton Becket style of the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy 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 Los Angeles, 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 topped with a glass-enclosed skyroom, two 13-storey office buildings, 1000 feet of commercial shops and retail space. Recent development plans for a $70 million entertainment center threatened to puncture the dome for a second-level entry and to reconfigure the seats for stadium seating and to substitute a flat screen. While the Cultural Heritage Commission of Los Angeles was willing to grant landmark status to the exterior of the dome and the marquee, it took several more months of wrangling between LA Conservancy, Friends of Cinerama and Hollywood Heritage to preserve the Cinerama screen. An agreement was reached to retain the dome and screen of the Cinerama structure. Construction for the shopping and entertainment center began in mid-2000. The theater temporarily shut down during the new construction but is scheduled to open again in spring 2002. The Cinerama Dome – which has been closed during new construction – will become the centerpiece of a three-level entertainment and retail center, featuring 14 additional screens in a separate building behind the existing Dome. The Dome itself will be renovated, but will not be chopped up into smaller theaters; the original 86 x 32 foot curved screen will remain intact. The Cinerama Theater was scheduled to reopen and exhibit existing classic Cinerama movies on a louvered screen as the originals were exhibited. When plans were announced that a single curved screen would be used instead, another controversy ensued. See Welkos (2002: A1).

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

References Albrecht, Donald (1987) Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Moving Picture. London: Thames and Hudson. Austin, Bruce A. (1985) ‘The Development and Decline of the Drive-In Movie Theater in Current 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 AntiAesthetic, trans. by John Johnston, pp. 126–34. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1988a) America, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso Baudrillard, 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, the Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life, pp. 222–33. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 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 United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hertenstein, Tom (1997) ‘Highways to Nowhere: Space, Speed and Freedom on the Electronic 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: Verlag Gerd 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, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Longstreth, Richard (2000) The Drive-in, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles 1914–1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCarthy, Anna (1995) ‘“The Front Row is Reserved for Scotch Drinkers”: Early Television’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.

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journal of visual culture 1(2) Moore, Charles, Becker, Peter and Campbell, Regula (1984) Los Angeles: The City Observed. New York: Vintage Books. Morley Cohen, Mary (1994) ‘Forgotten Audiences in the Passion Pits: Drive-In Theatres and Changing 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, MalletStevens, 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, 19 February: A1.

Anne Friedberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Visual Studies at the

University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (University of California Press, 1993) and co-editor of an anthology of critical and theoretical writing about film, Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (Cassell, 1998). Her current book project, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, situates the convergence of cinema, television and the computer screens within a cultural history of the window as an architectural and figurative trope. Address: Program in Film Studies, University of California, Irvine, 235 Humanities Instructional Building, Irvine, CA 92697-2435, USA. [email: [email protected]]