journal of visual culture

Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of Los

Angeles endless cinema or private telematics
Anne Friedberg
Abstract

This essay began as a portion of a book project which explores the trope of the
window both architectural and metaphoric and its relation to a framed
visuality. In the book, I consider screens the film screen, the TV screen, the
computer screen as component pieces of architecture, virtual windows which
render the wall permeable to light and ventilation in new ways, and which
dramatically change the materialities (and perhaps more radically the
temporalities) of built space. This essay discusses how the post-war movie
screens of Los Angeles negotiated the materiality and mobility of the driver and
the immateriality and stasis of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect
ratio of the film screen coincided with the panorama of the wraparound
windshield as well as with the horizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los
Angeles.
Key words

automotive visuality mobility screen spectatorship window windshield

Automotive visuality
As Reyner Banham (1971) noted at the beginning of his now classic study of Los
Angeles, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies:
... like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves
Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read
Los Angeles in the original. (p. 23)
The metropolitan logic of Los Angeles can only be understood through its requisite
automotive mobility; the imbricated histories of Los Angeles and the automobile

journal of visual culture

Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 1(2): 183-204 [1470-4129(200208)1:2;183-204;025251]

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Figure 1 I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original, Banham (1971: 23).

weave an explanatory logic to its urban sprawl. Autopia the optimistic pun
deployed by one of the opening rides at Disneyland in 1955 became one of
Banhams Four Ecologies (1971) and, he argued, the automotive experience of
urban space prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes
(p. 214).1 This essay explores the effects of automobility its combination of urban
mobility and automotive visuality and its relation to the virtual mobilities of
cinematic and televisual spectatorship.
The automobile is a viewing machine, moving individuals or, as one of my
students coined in a punning parapraxis, indi-visuals through urban space
(Hertenstein, 1997). Driving is a motorized form of flnerie, and the driver replays
the urban fluidity of the pedestrian whose itinerary was determined by boulevards,
alleys, passageways. The drive can avail itself of the potentials of psychogeographical drift, the situationist derive. Driving transforms the mobilized
pedestrian gaze with new kinetics of motored speed and with the privatization of the
automobile capsule sealed off from the public and the street. But the visuality of
driving is the visuality of the windshield, operating as a framing device. (Of course,
one is also sometimes a passenger, and the side windows and vents of an
automobile frame the view of the scenery, somewhat differently, en passant.)
As Los Angeles grew into a mobile metropolis, much of its vernacular architecture
was built for the drivers view. Buildings became signage, scenic attractions
designed to lure motorists from their cars. Seen through the windshield or car
window, Los Angeles unfolds as a narrativized screen space, obeying a spectatorial

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 2 Dennis Hopper, Double Standard, 1967. Permission of the artist. Courtesy of
Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

logic determined by the topography of the freeway and its off-ramp, the boulevard
and its alley, the winding hill drive and its rare vista.
Paul Virilio (1988) in a stroke of declamatory certitude has made the blunt
equation between automotive mobility and cinematic visuality, proclaiming: What
goes on in the windshield is cinema in the strict sense (p. 188).2 To Jean Baudrillard
another French interlocutor in this automotive discourse the frame of the
windshield is absent from his account of the city and the cinema screen. In America
(1988a), Baudrillard constructs a rhetorical equation between the freeways relation
to the city and the screens relation to reality:
The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it looks as though
the metropolis has actually been built around this arterial network. It is the
same with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, but
everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen
in mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen. (p. 55)
This ontological reversal is symptomatic of much of Baudrillards cultural analysis,
on a par with the frequently cited founding Baudrillardianism that soundbite of
the hyperreal:
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest
is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no
longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. (Baudrillard,
1988b: 172)

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Inverting the relationship between American urban space and the cinema screen,
Baudrillard (1988a) argues that the cinema its spectatorial mobilities, its
simulated visualities are not restricted to the screen but extend outward into our
urban reflexes. The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies,
he writes:
To grasp its secret, you should not then begin with the city and move inwards
towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards
towards the city. (p. 56)
Los Angeles provides an important case study in this regard. The windshield is
the permeable membrane between Los Angeles and its screens. In another essay,
Baudrillard (1983) described the private telematics of driving where: The vehicle
becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape
unfolding like a televised screen (p. 77). If Los Angeles itself is an endless
cinema screen seen through the windshield or a private television tuned to a
channel of vision determined by the drivers grasp on the steering wheel, then
how does the architecture of the Los Angeles movie theatre the palace, the
drive-in, the multiplex provide a frame for the virtual mobility of cinema
spectatorship?
Implicit here is a key and recurrent theoretical tangle: the tension between the
material reality of built space and the dematerialized imaginary that the cinema has
always provided. Cinematic spectatorship evinces twin paradoxes: (1) between
materiality and immateriality (of cinematic space); and (2) between mobility and
stasis (mobility of images, stasis of spectator). I explored this second paradox in my
discussion of the development of a mobilized yet virtual gaze in my book, Window
Shopping (1993). The cinema provided a virtual mobility for its spectators,
producing the illusion of transport to other places and times, but it did so within the
confines of a frame. Hence as the mobilized gaze became more virtual, it grew to
involve less physical mobility and relied more on its frame.
Paul Virilio (1989) has elsewhere described this paradoxical relation in vehicular
terms. Thinking of the spectator as a sedentary driver, he describes the
audiovisual vehicle, an evolutionary mutation of the (dynamic) automotive
vehicle.3 The audiovisual vehicle, for Virilio, is a static vehicle. Figure 3
illustrates this evolution: a steam locomotive speeds past in the night as two
sedentary viewers watch the film SkyTaxi in which an airplane soars through a
brightly lit virtual sky, seen through the windshield of a parked automobile.
In what follows, I explore the intersection between urban mobility and automotive
visuality (i.e. its materiality and mobility) by examining the screen its format, its
architectural context, its implied spectator (i.e. its immateriality and stasis). During
the post-war years, the size, format and location of the cinema screen was set into
fierce competition with the size, format and location of the television console.
Whereas the 1012 television screen was tailored to the domestic scale of the
home, movie theaters competed by differentiating their offerings with color, 3D and
wider screen formats. Drive-in roofless theaters or ozoners catered to the
mobility and domestic encapsulation of the automotive spectator; while four-

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 3 O. Winston Link, Hot Shot Eastbound, West Virginia, 2 August 1956. Reproduced
with the permission of the O. Winston Link Trust.

walled or hard-top theaters introduced Widescreen and Cinerama formats to

compensate for what the small black and white screens of television could not
supply. The protocols of cinema and televisual spectatorship changed as did the
architectural and spatial positioning of the screen.

The screen
So: lets begin with the screen. While the filmic representation of architectural
space and the work of architects on film decor and mise en scne have so far
been the predominant manner in which architecture and cinema have been cojoined,
a theory of film spectatorship that describes the shifting views of the spectator
engaged in an imaginary and virtual mobility, relies on a different concept of the
space of the cinema one that emphasizes the relation between the bodily space
inhabited by the spectator and the visuality presented by the space of the screen (see
Figure 4).4
The photograph in Figure 4 of S. Charles Lees downtown Los Angeles movie
palace the Los Angeles Theater built in 1931 illustrates the classical screen
format with an aspect of 1.33:1. This format with a basic 4:3 (width to height)
aspect was the screen format established in 1906 as an international standard for
film width and projection.
Hiroshi Sugimotos photographs, each of a blank and yet luminous cinema screen,

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Figure 4 Hiroshi Sugimoto, the Los Angeles Theater (1993). By permission of the artist.

help us to visualize the role of the screen itself. For the film spectator, the darkness
that surrounds the frame both minimizes its borders and calls us to play upon its
boundaries. The frame of the screen forms either a tableau-like proscenium, forcing
our vision to center its gaze or it implies a continuum of space lingering just
off-screen/off-frame. To capture the screen in its luminous blankness, Sugimoto
used an extended exposure time, holding his aperture open so long that the screened
images vanish; leaving only the projection light of an empty white screen to cast an
eerie glow on the architecture of the movie theater. Sugimotos screens expose
time.5 Cinema spectatorship, as one of its essential features, has always produced
experiences that are not temporally fixed. Its spectators not only engage in the fluid
temporalities of cinematic construction flashbacks, ellipses, a-chronologies but
also engage in time frames other than the spectators moment in historical time. The
cinema, as a unique tool of modernity, freed its spectators from the bindings of
material space but it could also cast its viewers free from the binds of time.
Sugimotos photographs return us to the tension between the bodily stasis of the
cinematic spectator and the virtual mobilities presented on the screen. What are the
spaces the spectator traverses in order to arrive at a seat in front of this screen? In
his short piece En sortant du cinma/Leaving the cinema, Roland Barthes (1980)
described the acts of entering/exiting the movie theater.6 Entering, the subject is
drawn from street to street, poster to poster, to abandon himself into an
anonymous, indifferent cube of darkness (p. 1). In this way, the cinema screen
becomes the endpoint of an urban itinerary, a final destination or restful respite for

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 5 Frederick Kiesler, Film Guild Theater, New York (1928).

the footsore flneur. Barthes compares the urban darkness of the movie theater to
the opposite experience of the television viewer where the space is familiar,
organized ... tamed (p. 2). Before we examine this opposition of cinematic and
televisual spectatorship, let me briefly return to some debates from the 1920s and
1930s about how architectural space contributes to the spectator effect.
Siegfried Kracauer (1926) supplied one answer in his now-well-known Frankfurter
Zeitung article, The Cult of Distraction, about the picture palaces of Berlin
designed by Hans Poelzig. To Kracauer, the architectural context of the film screen
in these optical fairylands (p. 323) undermined the potential power of the film
itself. Kracauer argued that the architecture of the theater deprived the film of its
rights (p. 328) and undercut what was on the screen, drawing it into a unity, a
gesamtkunstwerk of surface splendor.7 To Kracauer, movie theater architecture was
not about the screen, but everything else.
While Kracauers cranky reaction to the ornate decor of the movie palace may have
been at odds with a movie-going public that took as much comfort in architectural
hyperbole as they did from screen spectacle, his critique was consistent with the
architectural urge for modern functionalism found in the work of architects like
Viennese-born Frederick Kiesler. For Kiesler, the movie theater required new
designs. Present day cinema or motion picture houses, Kiesler wrote in 1928, are
not cinemas, but merely imitations of old European theatres into which a screen was
hung (p. 36). Previous theater architecture (and Poelzig was a prime example) was,
to Kiesler, stuck fast in decoration (p. 36). Kieslers 1928 design for the Film

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Figure 6 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Studio Drive-In (1993), Culver City. Reproduced by

permission of the artist.

Guild Theater in New York (see Figure 5) was designed solely for the projection of
the cinema (p. 16).
Figure 5 shows how to concentrate the publics attention on the screen, moving
diaphragms were installed in front of it. These were called screen-o-scope. The
diaphragms give to the curved screen behind them any shape and size (p. 17).
As Kiesler argued in Building a Cinema Theatre (1929):
The most important quality of the auditorium is its power to suggest
concentrated attention and at the same time to destroy the sensation of
confinement that may occur easily when the spectator concentrates on the
screen.
The spectator must be able to lose himself in an imaginary, endless space
even though the screen implies the opposite....
The first radical step toward the creation of an ideal cinema is the abolition of
the proscenium and all other stage platforms resemblance to the theatre....
My invention, the screen-o-scope, takes the place of these theatrical elements
and supplies a new method of opening the screen which eliminates curtains.
The interior lines of the theatre must focalize to the screen compelling
unbroken attention on the spectator. (pp. 1618, emphasis added)
Kieslers plan with walls and ceiling and adjustable main screen as projection
surfaces while never fully realized, was for a theater that surrounded the spectator
with filmed images; an imaginary, endless space.8

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 7 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cinerama Dome (1993), Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood.

Reproduced by permission of the artist.

An imaginary, endless space: metropolitan Los Angeles? Certainly, in contrast to

New York and Berlin, Los Angeles was a site where spectator/driver positions were
constantly negotiated. Post-war Los Angeles had to contend with two remarkable
transformations to domestic public and private life the automobile and television.
And both had profound effects on the screen.
The screens in Figures 6 and 7 exemplify the post-war changes to the size, format
and location of the screen. (Note the wider screen format in Figure 6 of the Studio
Drive-in and the 2.75:1 Cinerama format in Figure 7 of the Cinerama Dome.)

The automobile
After the hardships of the depression, and after curtailed wartime production and
gas rationing, post-war automobile ownership increased exponentially. The
architectural expansion of post-war Los Angeles continued to build for automobiles
and their drivers: drive-in restaurants, auto-court motels, supermarkets, car
dealerships, bowling alleys, car washes, gas stations, coffee shops and drive-in
theaters (Longstreth, 1998, 2000). Facades meant to lure car customers also
required parking to accommodate them.
The automobile had already begun to have effects on the movie-goer. To return to
Virilios (1989) term for the audiovisual vehicle the static vehicle in all its
immateriality required that the materiality of the automobile be dealt with.
Spectatorship if it is a radical metaphor for the windshield required the shedding
of the automotive capsule, i.e. parking. Figure 9 illustrates a Los Angeles area
theater (the Fox Florence, 1931) which offered its customers a Free Auto Park
Entrance (far right) a marquee entrance for drivers.

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Figure 8 Margaret Bourke-White, Theres no way like the American Way, Louisville, KY,
1937. Courtesy of Life Magazine.

Figure 9 S. Charles Lee, Fox Florence Theater, 1931.

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Television
The commercial introduction of television in 1948 produced what was called, in the
popular press, the Lost Audience. In the years between 1947 and 1957, movie
attendance dropped by one half and 90 percent of the American population acquired
a television. More than 4000 four-walled theaters closed between 1946 and 1956.
As if to lure these missing masses, there was a compensatory balance in the
construction of roofless theaters drive-ins (see Taylor, 1956: 1002; Austin,
1985: 5991; Gomery, 1992: 913).9 As Eric Johnson, president of the Motion
Picture Association of America, declared in 1952: Drive-ins more than make-up for
the total seats lost through the closedown of theaters.10
At the same time, the 1948 Supreme Court decision on the anti-trust suit U.S. vs.
Paramount Pictures, Inc et al. ruled that the Big Five movie studios had to divest
themselves of their theater holdings; the Divestiture Decision effectively separated
film production from exhibition. The film industry its producers and exhibitors
now divorced from each other and operating sometimes at cross-purposes had two
strategies to combat the commercial introduction of television. One was to
compromise by adjusting to the spectatorial advantages of television11 and the
other to compensate by offering screen size, color images and the immersive
spectatorship that television could not supply.
The rhetorical campaign to counter the threat of television is exemplified by the
advertising campaign designed to contrast the discomforts of television stay-athome viewing with the compensations of going out. This campaign, mounted by a
Los Angeles-based publicity company Hallmark of Hollywood, extolled the
virtues of screen size (the gigantism of 330 times!) and the fresh air respite of
leaving the domestic confinement of 4-walls. (A strategy with a touch of irony
only because these very theaters which represented leaving the 4-walls of home
for fresh air were referred to in the trades as 4-wallers not ozoners.)
The ad in Figure 10 boasts:
GOING OUT, going to the show is real fun! ... OUR GIANT screen
provides a wonderful picture with perfect sound. Its 330 times bigger than
the largest TV screen. TO GO OUT, to get away from those 4-walls, the eyestrain, those screaming commercials is indeed a treat.
The image in Figure 11 relies on the horizontal sprawl of Joanne Woodward (with
Lee J. Cobb lurking behind) in a still from the 1957 Cinemascope (2.35:1 formatted)
Three Faces of Eve. A tiny TV set contains the same image pitifully cropped with
a small 21 inch arrow measuring its size. The TV seems to radiate a haze of
benday (screen) dots: a barking dog, some fighting children, a crawling baby, a
woman clutching bills and an armchair-ridden man all bespectacled (including the
dog) no doubt due to eyestrain a cartoon of suffering produced by the shrunken
screen.
Captioned SHRINK EM, the ad copy proclaims:
The NEW SHOW SEASON is here! Theyre wide-screen and mostly in

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Figure 10 Up to 330 Times Bigger ... and Better from Hallmark of Hollywood publicity
campaign. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Los Angeles.

glorious, natural color. These wonderful shows can never be de-colorized and
shrunk to fill gaps between screamin commercials on little pea-shaped TV
screens.
HALLMARK of Hollywood will pay $50,000 to the genius who can
squeeze any one of these new, Big Hits down to TV-size without ruining this
fine entertainment!
NO ONE CAN SQUEEZE IT 330 TIMES!
In smaller print, the ad quantifies quality:
Think of it! This theatres Giant Screen is more than 330 times larger than any
TV set in town. Sitting home, youre missing 96% of the wonderful quality of
any film! Get out, breathe the fresh air, get away from those 4-walls!
At this theatre, youll find no beer cans ... no poor lighting ... no distorted
sound ... Youll suffer no eye strain ... no telephones ringing ... no screams,

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 11 SHRINK EM from Hallmark of Hollywood publicity campaign. Courtesy of

Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

squawks or arguments ... Therell be no interruptions of your relaxation by

yacking pitchmen: ... no shallow greys, no fades, no flips, no snow or
distracting shivering lines. Youll be in a different world of beautiful color
comfortable, completely and emotionally relaxed.
When you wish to Relax GO OUT TO A MOVIE! (emphasis added)12

The drive-in
Get out, breathe the fresh air, get away from those 4-walls! the drive-in. The
drive-in catered to post-war demographics families with small children, teenagers,
population migration to the suburbs while at the same time providing a
compromise between the giant screen, the going out factor of public exhibition,
and the domestic hermeticism of the private car. The wide screen of the windshield
fits the view of the whole family.
The drive-in spectators eating pizza behind the windshield in Figure 12 seem to

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Figure 12 Washington Post and Times Herald, 1955. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

answer the foodline in Margaret Bourke-Whites ironic visual epigram from 1937.
Drive-ins not only supplied copious concessions for spectators along with their
other attractions for pre-dusk family entertainments playgrounds, miniature golf,
pony rides, miniature trains but also supplied concessions for cars themselves
gasoline and windshield cleaning.
Called ozoners, drive-ins provided outdoor film exhibition and their weatherdependent viewing could be year round in southern California. Most important,

Figure 13 Drive-In Theater patent diagram, R.M. Hollingshead Jr, 16 May 1933. From
collection of the author.

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 14 Pico Drive-In, 1934.

however, for the drive-in theater spectator the screen must be visible through the
windshield. As the parking lot replaced theater seats, cars needed to be arranged to
solve problems of sightlines and viewing angles. Windshield-to-screen sightlines
were solved by parking cars on angled ramps facing toward concave screens,
positioning cars in succeeding rows so that the screen was visible from each car.
This idea was patented by a New Jersey exhibitor Richard Hollingshead in 1933
(see Figure 13). Hollingshead formed a company, Park-In Theaters, Inc., which sold
blueprints and franchises of his patent which included (1) a clamshell shaped lot,
(2) terraced parking rows, and (3) earthen ramps to tilt cars to proper sightline
elevation.13
Hollingsheads schematic drawing shows how parked cars needed to be tilted at an
angle sufficient for all occupants to see the screen over the car in front.
In 1934, Californias first the nations second drive-in opened in Los Angeles.
The marquee for the Pico Drive-in (Figure 14) demonstrates the important
components of drive-in spectatorship: (1) sit in your car; (2) see and hear; and
(3) the hyperbole (worlds largest) of screen size.
Of course, there were problems other than sightlines that needed to be overcome for
outdoor exhibition to work. There were sound problems: the first drive-ins blasted
their sound with RCA Victor loudspeakers. Post-war drive-ins solved the sound
problem with In-Car speakers (developed in 1941) wired and connected to
individual posts. There were luminance problems: drive-ins required long-throw
projectors with powerful arc lamps. Despite bright projection, drive-in exhibition

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Figure 15 Windshield sightlines and visibility demonstrated by Herbert S. Taylor in the

Journal of Society of Motion Picture Engineers (April 1948). Courtesy of Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

could only begin after dusk, when it was dark enough outside, effectively limiting
the number of screenings daily. But the sightline problems between windshield
and screen required careful adjustment. The screen needed to be seen through
the windshield, but also from the rear seat. Drive-in screens which were 4060
feet wide might fill the entire windshield. The images in Figure 15, from a
1948 article by an engineer for Park-In Theatres who specialized in improved
sightlines, demonstrate these difficulties. The figure on the left was captioned:
Photograph taken through the windshield from the rear end with the car parked in
the second ramp, while the figure on the right claimed: Same view, with car
parked in third ramp (Taylor, 1948).

Cinerama
While the drive-in combined automotive mobility and cinematic visuality and
catered to televisions domestic comforts, the four-walled hardtop theaters had to
rely on other strategies to retain cinematic spectators. Cinerama was one such
invention.
Cinerama was developed for the military during wartime and used by the Air Force
as training for gunners in simulated combat conditions. Pioneered by inventor Fred
Waller, financed by Laurence Rockefeller and promoted by business partner radio
commentator Lowell Thomas, Cinerama had its first commercial demonstration in
1952 with the feature-length travelogue This is Cinerama. Using a 3-lens camera, 3
projectors, 6-track recording and 612 loudspeakers, the film was projected onto a
concave screen, 146 degrees wide. As the editor of the Better Theaters section of
Motion Picture Herald declared after the This is Cinerama preview: Cinerama is
an expansion of the theatres motion picture, as televised films are a contraction of
it (Schutz, 1952).
Cinerama was not the first multiple-camera/projector system; Raoul Grimoin
Sansons 10-projector panoramic screen, the Cinorama which debuted at the Paris

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

Figure 16 Cinerama diagram, from This is Cinerama publicity

brochure, 1955. From collection of author.

1900 Exposition and Abel Gances 3-projector PolyVision for his 1927 film
Napoleon were other indications of the urge to widen the screen format. Cinerama
was only one of several subsequent and more successful screen formats
Cinemascope (1953), TODD-A-O (1954) and VistaVision (1955) designed to
present an immersive illusion of depth with screens wide enough to fill peripheral
vision (Belton, 1992). As one Cinerama ad boasted: You wont be gazing at a
movie screen. Youll find yourself swept right into the picture.
Eleven years after Cineramas first debut, a new theater opened in Hollywood, the
first new theater built in Hollywood for 30 years (Figure 17). Financed by Pacific
Drive-In Theaters who had built 38 outdoor cinemas in and around Los Angeles
the Cinerama Dome was a four-walled hardtop theater of a different sort. Built in
17 weeks, builders raced through a whirlwind 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week
construction schedule to meet its planned opening on 7 November 1963 for the gala
premiere of Stanley Kramers Its A Mad Mad Mad Mad World! (Although the
structure was named for Cinerama, A Mad Mad Mad Mad World! was filmed and
projected in a different process UltraPanaVision with a single 70mm projector
with anamorphic lens: 2.75:1.)14
The Los Angeles-based architectural firm of Welton Becket & Associates designed
the Dome, hiring a firm of structural engineers to help adapt the geodesic principles
of R. Buckminster Fuller. Welton Becket had designed many landmarks of
1950s/1960s Los Angeles: the Capitol Records Building (1954); the Beverly Hilton
Hotel (1955); the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport (1963);
and the downtown Music Center 19649.15

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Figure 17 Cinerama Dome, The Los Angeles Times, 4 November 1963. Courtesy of
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

The Cinerama Dome became an instant landmark. It was the first geodesic dome
built of concrete, fitting 316 hexagonal and pentagonal panels in 16 different sizes
into 35 different configurations of reinforced steel (see Figure 17). (Becket
concurrently designed the dome for the General Electric Pavilion at the 1964 New
York Worlds Fair.) The 52-foot high, 140-foot diameter dome vaulted the space for
a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling 74 by 32-foot screen. The Cinerama Dome was to
be a prototype for several hundred other Cineramas to be built in the US and
abroad, but as Cinerama films were expensive to produce and exhibit, this dream of
expansion did not occur.16
Los Angeless continued and future reliance on automobility was insured when
Pacific Electrics Red Car lines were discontinued in 1961. The Cinerama Dome
was purpose-built for the automotive spectator: it had ample parking (seating for
1000 and parking for 400 cars). By 1964, Los Angeles was the second most
populous city in the nation. It had 3.2 million cars. On the outside, the Cinerama
Dome was and remains a roadside attraction for the driver. Although the inside
screen may seem to have nothing to do with automobile culture or with catering to
the mobility of its post-war audience, the Cinerama screen unfolds its aspect ratio in
a horizontal expanse; it fills the view like a windshield.
The post-war screens of Los Angeles both the drive-in and the Cinerama Dome
brandished their size and their out-of-house locations to challenge the shrunken
indoor screens of television. Both negotiated the materiality and mobility of the

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

driver the need to park the vehicle in order to reach the immateriality and stasis
of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect ratio of the film screen
coincided with the panorama of the wraparound windshield as well as with the
horizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los Angeles. If the skyscraper like its
precursors the cathedral spire and the clocktower was an architectural monument
to aspiration, then the widescreen windshield seems to answer another somewhat
different desire: immersion in an imaginary, endless space.
Notes
1. Autopia remains the only original Tomorrowland attraction left from this original
Disneyland 1955 opening. Junior Autopia opened in Fantasyland in 1956, closed in 1958
and then reopened in 1959 as Fantasyland Autopia.
2. Margaret Crawford (1991) also compares automotive visuality with another screen
medium, television: Like television, another individualized medium, the automobile
distances us from the world outside our sealed capsule while restructuring and
abstracting it (p. 227).
3. Extract from Virilio (1989):
If in fact the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth experienced
the advent of the automotive vehicle, the dynamic vehicle of the railroad, the street, and
then the air, then the end of this century seems to herald the next vehicle, the audiovisual
one, a final mutation: static vehicle, substitute for the change of physical location, and
extension of domestic intertia, a vehicle that ought at last to bring about the victory of
sedentariness. (pp. 1089)

4. For discussions of architecture in the frame of the movie, of set design and mise en scne,
see Barsacq (1978), Albrecht (1987), Neumann (1996), Corliss and Clarens (1991) and
Cinema and Architecture (1991). Other recent accounts of the relationship between
cinema and architecture explore the representation of the space of the city. See Penz and
Thomas (1997) and Dimendberg (forthcoming).
5. See Kellein (1995). Sugimotos photographic studies of wax museums, dioramas, theater
interiors and drive-in theaters vividly play with the temporal fixity of the fixed
photographic image.
6. Roland Barthes short piece En sortant du cinma appeared in the famous issue of
Communications 23 (1975) and was translated by Bertrand Augst and Susan White in
Apparatus (1980).
7. Kracauer (1995[1926]) decreed that the movie theater should be free of all trappings that
deprive film of its rights ... to ... a kind of distraction which exposes disintegration
instead of masking it (p. 328).
8. Kiesler (1929): Kieslers design called for still and moving pictures to be shown on the
walls and ceiling as well as on the main screen which could be adjusted in size and
shape. The theaters walls and ceiling sloped toward the front screen and were covered
with black material designed as projection screens. Kiesler had designed special
machines to project onto a black surface. The Film Guild Cinema was described in an
article in the special Better Theatres section of Exhibitors Herald-World (see Fox,
1929). Kiesler was not the only architect to argue against the distracting ornamentation
of the movie palace and for the immersion of the spectator. In 1933, A.V. Pilichowski
wrote in the pages of the English language film journal, Close Up:
What seems required for a cinema to be truly cinematic is a more immediate contact
between the screen and the audience. My suggestion is for a panoramic screen; the idea
being that the screen should encircle the audience and thus make it part of a complete
system. Mobile multiple projectors would throw pictures on the screen, the action being

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started at one end and terminated at the other. Visibility would not be required to be perfect
from every seat at the same time, a certain element of interest being aroused by hiding,
revealing, and hiding again the picture as it sweeps around the screen. (p. 69)

9. I would also like to acknowledge an excellent essay on drive-in spectatorship that has
just come to my attention: Morley Cohen (1994).
10. Eric Johnson, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, quoted in
Business Week, 9 August 1952: 47. Post-war drive-in growth: by the end of the Second
World War there were only 300 nationwide, by 1952 there were 3276 nationwide; by
1958 nearly 5000. The 1967 Census of Business reported 11,478 theaters in the US, 8094
4-walls and 3384 drive-ins. Other statistics from Balio (1976) and Gomery (1992).
11. In an early attempt to broker a compromise between the new programming available on
television screens and the out-of-the-home theater-going audience, in 1947 and 1948
theaters began to have TV viewing lounges, using screens of 15 x 20 feet. Anna
McCarthy (1995) has explored the role of television outside the domestic arena the
barstool audience in taverns and the boxing audience for theater television. See also
McCarthy (2001).
12. Hallmark of Hollywood publicity campaign; clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.
13. R.M. Hollingshead, Patent #1,909,537 for a Drive-In Theater was approved by the
United States Patent Office on 16 May 1993. The Hollingshead patent was later reversed
in Federal Circuit Court when his invention was ruled as landscape architecture and not
patentable.
14. Despite claims to the contrary, the Cinerama Dome was not the first theater designed
exclusively for Cinerama. The Golden Triangle of three mid-western Cooper Cineramas
were the first purpose-built Cinerama theaters the Denver Cooper which opened in
March 1961, Minneapolis Cooper in August 1962 and Omaha Cooper in November
1962. Before the early 1960s, theaters which were adapted to show Cinerama had to be
remodeled, conforming their rectangular floorplans and stadium seating to the new
angles of the curved screen.
15. Charles Moore describes the Welton Becket style of the Mark Taper Forum and the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as: Late Imperial Depression Style cake (see Moore et al.,
1984: 15). Becket died in 1969 yet his firm retained his name after his death. In Los
Angeles, both Century City and the Beverly Center bear his name.
16. The original plan for the Cinerama Dome included a 400-room 16-storey hotel topped
with a glass-enclosed skyroom, two 13-storey office buildings, 1000 feet of commercial
shops and retail space. Recent development plans for a $70 million entertainment center
threatened to puncture the dome for a second-level entry and to reconfigure the seats for
stadium seating and to substitute a flat screen. While the Cultural Heritage Commission
of Los Angeles was willing to grant landmark status to the exterior of the dome and the
marquee, it took several more months of wrangling between LA Conservancy, Friends of
Cinerama and Hollywood Heritage to preserve the Cinerama screen. An agreement was
reached to retain the dome and screen of the Cinerama structure. Construction for the
shopping and entertainment center began in mid-2000. The theater temporarily shut
down during the new construction but is scheduled to open again in spring 2002. The
Cinerama Dome which has been closed during new construction will become the
centerpiece of a three-level entertainment and retail center, featuring 14 additional
screens in a separate building behind the existing Dome. The Dome itself will be
renovated, but will not be chopped up into smaller theaters; the original 86 x 32 foot
curved screen will remain intact. The Cinerama Theater was scheduled to reopen and
exhibit existing classic Cinerama movies on a louvered screen as the originals were
exhibited. When plans were announced that a single curved screen would be used
instead, another controversy ensued. See Welkos (2002: A1).

Friedberg Urban mobility and cinematic visuality

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February: A1.

Anne Friedberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Visual Studies at the

University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Window Shopping: Cinema and
the Postmodern (University of California Press, 1993) and co-editor of an
anthology of critical and theoretical writing about film, Close Up 19271933:
Cinema and Modernism (Cassell, 1998). Her current book project, The Virtual
Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, situates the convergence of cinema, television
and the computer screens within a cultural history of the window as an architectural
and figurative trope.
Address: Program in Film Studies, University of California, Irvine, 235
Humanities Instructional Building, Irvine, CA 92697-2435, USA. [email:
afriedbe@uci.edu]