Urban mobility and cinematic visuality: the screens of Los Angeles - endless cinema or private telematics

Abstract

This essay began as a portion of a book project which explores the trope of the window - both architectural and metaphoric - and its relation to a framed visuality. In the book, I consider screens - the film screen, the TV screen, the computer screen - as component pieces of architecture, ‘virtual windows’ which render the wall permeable to light and ‘ventilation’ in new ways, and which dramatically change the materialities (and - perhaps more radically - the temporalities) of built space. This essay discusses how the post-war movie screens of Los Angeles negotiated the materiality and mobility of the driver and the immateriality and stasis of the spectatorial experience. The widening aspect ratio of the film screen coincided with the panorama of the ‘wraparound’ windshield as well as with the horizontal urban sprawl of a growing Los Angeles.