Introduction: Entering the Movie Theater

The movie theater remains a rather curious institution, an unlikely bricks-and-mortar outpost for a cultural form heralded as defiantly mobile, malleable, reproducible, and accessible. Plainly, the basic idea of a theater long predates cinema, pulling forward the significance of dedicated or specially demarcated spaces for traditions and practices of live drama, performed music, and public oration as well as circus barkers, burlesque artists, magicians, and middle-brow occultists. Theaters frame sites of performative possibility, marking off a pedestrian or prosaic sound or gesture from the potentially profound. Theaters generally are sites for performances put on by some people for others who gather to watch, listen, and possibly respond or interact with the show. Building on the seeming contradiction of dedicated spaces that host scheduled but fleeting events, the movie theater separates one particular cinema space from those of other theatrical entertainments, enacting specific regulatory and ritualized frameworks. Its longevity has been further assured by its technological complexity: a sturdy combination of architecture, amplified sounds, controlled light, conditioned air, and that strange yellow stuff on the popcorn.

For film scholars, the movie theater’s bulk, its standardization, and its technological heft have rarely been seen as an impediment to cinema. Quite to the contrary, the movie theater has long been the privileged and often idealized site for understanding the specificities of cinema, whether conceived as a mass medium, a popular entertainment, or modernist art.¹ The significance of the movie theater undergirds histories of the powerful American industry, changing leisure patterns, and enduring theories that seek to assess the specific language of film and its relationships to subjectivity, identity, and experience. To be sure, the movie theater’s place is rightfully prominent in film and media studies, as the movie theater has provided a long profitable and enduring stage for the encounter between moving images and those who watch them, between an industry and its paying customers, between artists and their interlocutors. Yet in the contemporary moment it is necessary to think of the theater as but one iteration of film presentation—a particular viewing platform—one among many way stations in a dispersed and voluminous flow of content. Better situating the role of the theater in the fully contextualized present can also help us to better understand the ways in which the theater has and has not been important throughout film history, in turn helping us to cast all film performance and display in fuller relief.

Yet this special issue reminds us that theaters are a persistent and specific kind of cinema space, one that undoubtedly exercised, and continues to exercise, a strong influence on movie making, watching, and thinking. The essays gathered here ask us to think again and more precisely about the things, the experiences, the smells, and the sensations that constitute watching and hearing movies in particular kinds of spaces. In short, they invite us to enter the movie theater with renewed critical energies and enlivened writerly curiosity. Three of the essays consider the space of the movie theater itself, while two consider related spaces of film presentation. In doing so, these essays assert that the spaces in which people gather to watch films are not empty spaces where screens and projected imagery work their way over us but are rather sites full of significant things and spaces rich in meaning.

Studies of the movie theater have tended to be placed in the film studies subfield of exhibition studies. Scholars of film exhibition make several essential presumptions about cinema and its history. Primary among them is that movies don’t just appear, they are presented. Moreover, they are made visible by a particular kind of display logic, one often predicated on sizable, seated, and repeat audiences that rent, among other things, a line of sight to the screen. The magic of the movies does indeed rely on magicians. But among the directors, stars, and effects wizards are also architects and designers, theatrical technicians, electrical engineers, ambitious entrepreneurs, masters of publicity, and event planners who have long worked their craft to shape the experience of watching. Some are earnest programmers of the artistic or obscure...