Professor Davidson’s mention of the 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial in her blog post made me think about the ways that design and architecture impact the way that we consume media. I initially thought about the design of theaters as external to the medium of film itself, but the extent to which movie theaters still feature curtains around the screen made me wonder about why this was such an important part of cinema design. Beyond dampening sound, this seems like a purely decorative holdover; the actual opening of a curtain has been a part of my movie-going experience only a handful of times (and these were all years ago). Additionally, most of the theaters where I grew up were built during or after the 1990s and simply have a horizontal drape running along the top of the screen and two panels hanging down the sides to imitate curtains open on a stage with a proscenium arch. Movie theaters seem to be remediating an aspect of theater design that is no longer a necessary component the medium they’re meant to showcase, but why? I realize that the connections between theater and stage design and media might be tenuous ones, but I’m hoping that my sketch of similarities and differences between these two different types of theaters can say something productive.

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My assumption is that theater curtains help to create the sense of immediacy, the sense that we are looking into a “real” world when watching a play. Depending on the production, the proscenium arch and curtains often end up demarcating where the play’s action takes place on the stage, which (I argue) means that it becomes a part of the medium whether we think about it that way or not. It offers hypermediacy in the way that it reminds us that what we’re watching should be immediate. It’s a “window” into something real, but we’re very aware of the artifice of that boundary. While an individual audience member may not experience the play like virtual reality, that is from a first-person point of view in which their standpoint is the “visual center of that world” (Bolter and Grusin 316), the production usually does direct their “play” towards them.  Phrases like “pulling back” or “opening” the curtain signal that we are witnessing something real, often because we imagine it would be hidden if the theatrical experience hadn’t given us access at that immediate moment. This makes me think, also, of performances/rites in religious settings. I’ll use the example from my own upbringing in Christian churches whose services include the use (performance) of a fairly involved liturgy or order of service. The celebrant is often separated from the congregation by some form of horizontal boundary, usually a rail or steps—during the medieval period this would have often been a literal screen. What the congregation sees of these rites and what is prepared away from them (and out of sight) is carefully managed. I don’t think that proscenia have roots in Christian religious celebrations, so this is more of an affinity than a strict genealogy; however, I think the comparison is a striking one since both of these practices of separation highlight an assembled group of people’s immediate perception of a type of reality. In the case of believers, this usually involves the corporeal manifestation of a deity. For an audience in a proscenium theater, the curtain rising often marks the spatial and temporal limits of the world of a play, a world which they choose to believe in. While audiences may want to believe in the immediacy of that staged world, it is (depending on the production) immediacy is often dependent on the hypermediacy of the window created by proscenium and curtains.

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My initial assumption was that movie theaters (movie “palaces” in their heyday) simply appropriated curtains because films were shown in theaters meant for stage productions, or because theater operators wanted to mimic the familiar experience of going to staged plays. After some brief (and rather inconclusive) research, I’ve learned that the use of the front curtain in movie theaters often had a bit more of an active role in an audience member’s movie-going experience than I’d assumed. In the same way that the closing of curtains often signaled the break between acts or scenes for a staged show (allowing time for scenery to shift, etc.), curtains would often be opened and closed between newsreels, shorts, and main features. One commenter, responding to a piece in the Chicago Reader on the decreased use of curtains in movie theaters argues for their benefit by noting that:

Projectionists in the old days were trained never to let the audience see the white screen. You dimmed the lights, started the projector, opened the dowser and then opened the curtains on the first images to hit them. Some theatre owners and projectionists preferred opening after the studio logo faded out. Same thing when the movie ended, curtain closing timed to end with final fade out, again no white screen visible to your audience!

This irritation at seeing a blank screen hints at a sort of horror vacui. If the architecture of movie theaters originally remediated that of a live theater through the use of a proscenium arch and curtains, this abhorrence of the blank space of the screen makes sense. Many audience members at these types of live theaters would rarely, if ever, have seen the cavernous empty backstage space behind scrims and set pieces. Similarly, Ben Sachs, the author of the same Chicago Reader piece laments that “cinemas would forgo this age-old amenity, which has the effect of rendering the big screen separate from (one might even say more mysterious than) the world outside the theater” (Sachs). Sachs’s desire for a separation between the world of the screen and the outside speaks to a wish to lose oneself in the former. While film’s remediation of certain elements of the stage may promise a more immediate experience, it is the hypermediated action of drawing back the curtain that (for him) facilitates that immediacy. We want to believe that we are looking through a window into a different world. As Sachs asks, “How can a theater create anticipation for a movie when it seems as though the projectionist has arrived at it by changing the channel on a giant TV?” (Sachs). This comment makes it clear that curtains are an unnecessary aspect of watching a film. However, the framing function that they perform, while a construct, appears to make the experience of film more real.

I realize that we consume film very differently these days, so this example may not make as much sense as I’m hoping. Similarly, a proscenium is only one type of stage, and immersive theater productions like Sleep No More certainly don’t fit in with this analysis (though I wonder if we could think productively about the ways that they remediate virtual reality experiences).  Indeed, I’m still concerned that theater doesn’t really work as an example at all. At the very least, however, thinking about the ways that theater curtains create a “window” onto an scene that is meant to feel immediate has given me a helpful way to think about that experience along with hypermediacy.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to my blog! My name is Brian Eberle, and I’m a 2^nd year PhD student in the English department. In spite of being a member of what somebody once termed the “look at me” generation, talking about myself has always felt like an onerous task—especially online. However, the opportunity to improve the way that I communicate through writing in online settings like blog and discussion posts is one of the reasons that I’m excited about taking this class. So, here goes!

I’m originally from California where I got my BA from Chapman University and my MA from California State University, Long Beach. I moved to New York in 2017 and started at Stony Brook in the Fall of 2019. Before my move, I taught English classes at community colleges in Southern California, which brings me to another reason that I’m excited to take WRT 614: I’m hoping to get a better understanding of how digital spaces shape students’ writing habits. Although the courses I taught relied on certain digital tools like email, Blackboard-type sites, and the occasional use of YouTube, I was reluctant to stray too far from many of the models of writing instruction that I’d seen my teachers using. So, for the sake of my future students, I’m looking forward to gaining more familiarity with multimodal rhetoric here.

Additionally, I’m interested in digital literacy from a research perspective. I study British modernism and am particularly interested in how changing conceptions of urban space impacted the narrative styles we see in modernist novels. Although this period is typically thought of as having taken place between 1890 and 1945 in Europe and the US, scholars are reevaluating locating the movement in such a narrow time-frame and space. Instead some, like Susan Stanford Friedman, see modernism as the aesthetic reaction to modernity more generally: different modernisms occur during different periods in different places. Because of this argument, I’ve begun to give more credence to the idea that we’ve applied “post” in postmodern a bit prematurely and that many writers and artists are still engaging with the world in ways that might appropriately be described as modernist. Additionally, I would argue that both the excitement and anxiety over contemporary technical advances, as Werner Herzog depicts in Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, parallel the reactions of many modernist writers to the shifts that took place during their own lives. While Herzog doesn’t touch on many artistic or literary responses to our (over)reliance on the internet, I think that it’s worth considering how we might think of those responses in terms of modernism and modernity. To better understand this, I’m hoping to increase my own digital literacy.

Thanks for reading! I’m excited to interact with all of you in the coming weeks!