| This dissertation analyzes spectatorship in what I term the American "neutralized," or architecturally efficient, movie theater movement (late 1920s-1950s) in the interdisciplinary contexts of film and visual theory, modernist architecture, and aesthetics. While maintaining the importance of economics to theater design, the project asserts the neutralized cinema's indebtedness to discourses of modernism, contemplation, perception, immersion, attention, and new theories of space, which both relied on and challenged previous models of aesthetic experience. As such, I argue that the functional, post-movie palace theater insisted on environment's primacy in visual experience, ushering in an era of contemplative looking dependent on both the emergence of moving imagery and approaches to volumetric, haptic, and phenomenological space that modernist architecture and revelatory film theory brought to the forefront. In focusing on the space of reception, architects of neutralization reframed film as a sublime artwork and insisted on interrogating embodied visual experience to calibrate spectatorship. Their cinemas were flashpoints for a twentieth-century revolution in space, display, and looking, products at once of older aesthetic philosophies and a modern investment in space and spectatorial subjectivity. Overall, I argue that this form of ideal spectatorship predicated on a modern spatial impulse is not unique to the neutralized movie theater, but can be traced through Wagnerian theatrical space, art installations and galleries, certain spaces of medical and pathological seeing, and contemporary modes for accessing the sublime. |
