Cinema was one of the hallmarks of early-20th-century urban life in the US, and it was quickly seen as symptomatic of a ‘crisis of governmentality’ faced by a rapidly changing society. Urban reformers debated how best to regulate it, but this was not only a debate over the unprecedented agency of the moving image itself. It was also a debate over how to understand the specific relations that constituted the ‘vulnerable and impressionable’ spectators who were the special concern of social reform and which underlay the more generic categories of population in reformist discourse. Also problematized was the precise relationship between spectators, the image, and the conditions of exhibition. While the problematization of cinema has largely been seen as a national phenomenon, in fact it had a geography that varied by scale and location and was constituted through local differences in population and governmental strategies.
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