The Way We Watch: Filmgoing Finds Form, 1946–63

“Cinema,” the French film theorist André Bazin wrote in 1955, “begins with exhibition.” Today, as audiences shift their viewing habits from the public movie theater to the comfort of their couches, industry insiders and cultural critics loudly worry that the American film industry is at death's door. But the same professionals and pundits made similar proclamations in the past, and the history of American theatrical exhibition ultimately suggests a different and more positive outcome for today's filmgoers.

Between 1946 and 1962, the American film industry transformed dramatically as antitrust legal challenges, the widespread adoption of television, and demographic shifts fractured Hollywood’s generations-old business model. Just as the industry’s vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition practices broke apart, so too did its monopoly on American eyes. At the same time, the Baby Boom psychologically and physically altered filmgoing as millions of new families sought suburbanized and family-friendly film sites. As box office receipts declined, the industry and the moviegoing public debated the cultural and critical value of motion picture exhibition. This moment of intense instability facilitated innovation and experimentation in the physical and material realities of the cinematic apparatus. While producers developed new aspect ratios and technologies like advances in color film stock, exhibitors also adapted the architecture of cinemas to present pictures on larger screens, often in more suburban settings, or in novel filmgoing models like the drive-in. In this poster presentation, I argue that the midcentury American film industry's technological, commercial, and cultural adaptations ultimately crystalized into a recognizable cultural practice that persisted for the next half century, and one that continues to influence filmgoing today.

This poster presentation uses vintage trade advertisements, newspaper clippings, and photography to illustrate midcentury film technologies and the material cultures of filmgoing. The use of select film stills also affords comparisons between various film technologies like black-and-white and color film stocks or flat and widescreen presentations, and also serve as primary-source texts that further open up my interdisciplinary approach for this historical and cultural analysis.