The place of space in film historiography

Abstract

Elsewhere I have argued that film studies as it has been practiced over the past thirty years or so has been haunted by the spectre of the empirical: a persistent ambivalence toward anything that exists outside the text and beyond the edges of the screen. This ambivalence has its roots in the conventionalism of the dominant strands of film theory in the 1970s and, despite the field's moving into what some have called a 'post-theory' era, is sustained by teaching and analytical practices that owe a great deal to film's academic alliance (in the us, at least) with literary studies. 1 One consequence of film studies' focus on text and textual interpretation has been the suppression or marginalizing of the spatiality of the experience of cinema. However, new histories of movie exhibition, movie audiences, and the social experience of moviegoing along with the deployment of new technologies for reimagining and representing these histories suggest the need to reconstitute the object of film studies in relational, social, and, in fundamentally spatial terms. In this paper, I would like to suggest how an engagement with recent theoretical work on space and spatial representation might inflect such a re-spatialised notion of film and film history. As I work toward my own account of the history of moviegoing in the Ameri-can South and toward a database of moviegoing in North Carolina I am constantly confronted with the question: How can and should the experience of cinema by millions of people in tens of thousands of places over more than a century of moviegoing be represented? Although there are plenty of examples to the contrary in film history, we tend to associate the spatiality of cinema with particular places and thereby conflate the space of cinema with the places of cin-ematic exhibition. It is easy to think of the movie theatre as a fixed and empty space that contains the temporal experience of watching particular films. Spatial representation practices tend to accentuate the apparent inertness and ahis-toricality of such places. Photo books of picture palaces are the representational correlative of the picturesque in landscape painting: showing them as empty, waiting, fixed in time, their superfluous architectural elaborations endowing the places of cinema with a timeless stability and materiality seemingly necessary to counter the accidental flux of performance and the continual mobility of | 15