Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-Movie-Going Age

Abstract

As theatrical movie-going is supplanted by other modes of engaging with cinema, it becomes more apparent that one of the most striking features of the experience of cinema for a century was its sociality. Prior to the 1980s, the experience of cinema around the world involved groups of people converging upon particular places to experience together something understood to be cinema. As it emerged as a cultural industry, cinema depended upon the regular repetition of this social practice under the sign of cinema. This article explores the application of digital technologies in representing the history of the experience of cinema in one American state (North Carolina) across the first three decades of commercial cinema. Going to the Show (www.docsouth.unc.edu/gtts) uses data from city directories, newspapers, photographs, architectural drawings, newspaper ads and articles to recover that which is representable about the experience of movie-going in an online archive. This material is itself represented as a layer on more than 1000 digitally stitched and georeferenced map pages for 45 towns and cities in the state. What emerges is a ‘view’ of movie-going as part of the experience of urban life at a time when towns and cities in North Carolina – and across the United States – were taking on their modern character and institutions. It also affords a unique perspective on the role of race as the determinative social factor in the experience of movie-going for all North Carolinians and, by extension, millions of other Americans.