Nostalgia for the Dark

Author(s):  
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

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.

TERRITORIO ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Consonni ◽  
Graziella Tonon
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Theresa McCulla

In 1965, Frederick (Fritz) Maytag III began a decades-long revitalization of Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, California. This was an unexpected venture from an unlikely brewer; for generations, Maytag's family had run the Maytag Washing Machine Company in Iowa and he had no training in brewing. Yet Maytag's career at Anchor initiated a phenomenal wave of growth in the American brewing industry that came to be known as the microbrewing—now “craft beer”—revolution. To understand Maytag's path, this article draws on original oral histories and artifacts that Maytag donated to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History via the American Brewing History Initiative, a project to document the history of brewing in the United States. The objects and reflections that Maytag shared with the museum revealed a surprising link between the birth of microbrewing and the strategies and culture of mass manufacturing. Even if the hallmarks of microbrewing—a small-scale, artisan approach to making beer—began as a backlash against the mass-produced system of large breweries, they relied on Maytag's early, intimate connections to the assembly-line world of the Maytag Company and the alchemy of intellectual curiosity, socioeconomic privilege, and risk tolerance with which his history equipped him.


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