| Taking Henri Lefebvre's contention that "every mode of production produces its own space," this dissertation attempts to show the connection between the movie screen and the Taylorist-Fordist mode of socioeconomic regulation. Social relations are not produced by a purely economic base, but by material conditions of everyday practice, where the economic and the cultural are not separate. One of these practices of Late Capitalism is the cinema. The screen itself is a production of space, where meaning is "geographically" arranged upon its surface and contours. Additionally, it is linked to the associated spaces of the movie audience---the theater, the neighborhood, et cetera.;A modernist subjectivity responsive to Fordist social regulation thus arises from the material conditions involved in these practices of space, rather than from a mystical "apparatus" or "gaze." This spatial production of subjectivity is linked to relations of power inscribed in those productions of space, and negotiated through everyday practices. But productions of space also entail history, and their analysis must account for moments of transition---differential space---and moments of regulatory stabilization---hegemonic space: the "cinema of attractions" and the Nickelodeons are differential spaces under transitional Taylorism; the formalized grid (screen space) of the Classic Hollywood Model and the movie palaces become hegemonic spaces under Fordism. With the Great Depression, cinema had to anchor its modernist discourse within a recodified nationalism, while a counterelite produced contesting practices of space of the avant-garde screen.;A final chapter details plans for future research on the productions of small screen space---television and computers---tied to decaying Hard-Fordism and a new global stabilization under Flexible Accumulation; where Postmodern and Postnational forms of cinema coexist with television, only to be displaced by computers. This transformation of screen space is evidence enough that history has not come to an end with Globalization, and that the analysis of such an increasingly dominant production of everyday space serves to illuminate the manner in which contemporary social relations are produced. |
