Theater After Film, or Dismediation

In 1902, the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. took out the copyright on a film listed by the Library of Congress, where it forms part of the Paper Print Collection, as “Star Theatre.” The short film is now more often known and discussed under the more elaborate title, “Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre.” Using simple but effective time-lapse techniques, it records the demolition, in April, 1901, of the Star Theatre at the northeast corner of Broadway and 13th Street in Manhattan.¹ The offices of the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. were across the street, and the company saw that film could capture the deliberate demolition of the building. The film company also took advantage of its medium, and urged exhibitors to reverse the direction of the film through the projector after first playing it as shot. So, as exhibited, the spectacle of the rebuilding of the theater followed demolition, hence the “building up” of the longer and more common title.

“Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre” sensationally pictures what sense experience cannot register on its own. As my title will have signaled, what especially interests me here is the way that the film places this automatic registration of what the eye cannot see in relation to the demolition of a theater. That is, the self-conscious display of a possibility of film as medium happens in relation to the obsolescence of a particular stage. How to read this self-reflexive exhibition of the force of film as medium is, however, not self-evident. How, in particular, should one understand the “building up”? The cinematic rebuilding of the theater is only virtual: the spectator knows that it is a special effect. In this way, the film might seem an early, spectacular promise of film’s colonization of what had been the aesthetic terrain of the theater. In all too easy retrospect, it is hard not to see the film as harbinger of the cinema’s international hegemony as medium over the disintegrating theater. Speed things up, and a cinematic lapse in time can show the decline of the theater; the trick of rebuilding what theater did is only a special effect, one made possible by the new medium.

At the time of this early twentieth-century demolition, film’s triumph was itself only a distant potential, and the Star Theatre was, in fact, not permanently in ruins but moving uptown to the more vibrant theatrical hub growing around Times Square, leaving Union Square to a new industry that had not yet discovered the permanent sunshine of the Los Angeles basin. The film might allegorize the inevitable dismantling of the theater. And yet the building up of this fantasmatic theater, made possible by the medium of film in reverse, also suggests an alternative allegory: the destruction of a theater, caught on film, lays the groundwork for a new theater, a theater made in part of the effects of film. My argument will move in that direction, suggesting that film’s catastrophic effects on theater were, in a scenario no less paradoxical than the building up of the collapsed Star, also a source of the remarkable experiments of postwar theater.²

To many now, theater seems the most embarrassingly residual of media, sustained only by the undead force of petrified distinction in a mediascape where it will never again be new. Where, implicitly or explicitly, the subject is a historical progression of media, theater is very often relegated to the ragged company of antiquated forms technological progress has long since transcended. Following some accounts, succinctly captured, but also challenged, by J. Hoberman’s title, Film after Film, theater is now cinema’s predecessor in another way, as an exemplar of a pattern of unplanned obsolescence to which film, too, now falls victim.³ More typically still, theater simply has no place in contemporary discussions of media, except very often as a metaphor for more important shifts happening elsewhere. A solution to this predicament of arrested development common to scholars of theater is to claim that as a medium it returns us to forms of experience other media cannot match. In...