Nostalgia for the Dark
This chapter discusses the movie palace’s decline and the beginnings of the neutralized movie theater from the 1920s to 1932. While much scholarship has attributed the transition to either economics after the Depression or the emergence of sound, the chapter argues for the importance of modernist architectural trends, such as the work of Le Corbusier, and new dimensions of spectatorship invested in attention. Modern machine culture reinforced the need for a theater structure that would make spectators into parts of a filmic assembly line. Ben Schlanger emerges as the loudest voice of neutralization, demanding a “slaughtering” of unnecessary decoration in the urban movie theater. His and multiple lighting designers’ work with light and darkness in the theater exemplify the upheavals in 1920s–1930s exhibition: from a theater with a panoply of effects to one centered on the dramatic play of light and dark within the film and its environment.