Attending to the movies: Human science, Progressive reform, and the construction of Hollywood's audience

Entitled "Attending to the Movies," this dissertation draws on the histories of the human sciences, the Progressive reform movement's Social Survey Movement, mass circulation magazines, and the rationalization of industry to situate the emergence of the modern film industry within the context of what I am calling the "statistical imagination." The interdisciplinary approach of the dissertation argues that the statistical imagination, understood here by building on recent scholarship in population and audience studies, allowed the cinema's early audience to be popularly constructed as a "problem population," recognizably in need of analysis and reform. Such statistical data, I demonstrate, were generated and given meaning by the human sciences, mobilized by the Progressive reform movement, and institutionalized in the transforming film industry's drive toward greater rationalization in the 1910s. It was crucial to each of these discourses, albeit for different reasons, that the indeterminate behavior of a collection of individuals gathered at the site of a film exhibition be regularized as an "audience" and produced as an object of knowledge and intervention. Through this process of institutionalized relations, the idea of the audience took on its own reality and became itself generative of material consequences, which continue to impact our understanding of the relationship between cinema and culture to this day. The dissertation concludes by suggesting insights into the textual, cultural, and governmental implications of knowing audiences in this way.