The spaces of viewing: Film, architecture, exhibition, spectatorship

"The Spaces of Viewing" confronts the relationship between exhibition spaces and those who attend films, an emphasis I approach as an essential supplement to the more obvious and discussed relationship, that between the cinematic apparatus and the audience. This project emphasizes the "movie house" as a particular site for the investigation of American film and cultural history. Within this focus, the project addresses certain related concerns: audience reception, cinema spectatorship, and architectural space.;Following the example offered by film historian Miriam Hansen, my project considers the divide between film history and film theory. Surveying various late twentieth-century methodologies that seek to conceptualize the relations between films and viewers as a point of departure, I examine how cinema spectatorship has been considered as implicitly formed by the structures of films on one hand while a competing model starts with the empirical moviegoer in his or her demographic contingency. I mediate between these two positions in order to underscore how aspects of exhibition sites work to subtly construct the viewing experience.;In each of my additional chapters, I use the case study as a model for performing local film history derived from such scholars as Robert C. Allen, Kathryn Fuller, Douglas Gomery, and Gregory Waller. I demonstrate new findings regarding a neighborhood Art Deco exhibition space, the Campus Theatre (1941-- ), and mid-century movie-going in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. As the dissertation's centerpiece, I am able to combine historical and material approaches---in looking at an actual viewing space and its practices---with theoretical, speculative work on architecture, public sphere theory, and gendered space. Arguing that the present is a particularly rich period of exhibition, my final chapter relates current film practices to the contemporary practices of historic cinema architectural restoration and preservation and to the recent explosion and proliferation of film exhibition contexts and spaces. I conclude the thesis with an Epilogue, a return to 1920s Florida film history.