Monday, September 30, 2024 at 7:30pm
The Metropolis of Spectacle: Casablanca’s Cinema Architecture and the Colonial Public Sphere
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
A lecture by Craig Buckley
In this talk, scholar Craig Buckley draws from his forthcoming book The Street and the Screen: Architectures of Spectatorship in the Age of Cinema, which explores the development of cinema architecture in the first half of the twentieth century. Screens, he argues, are not strictly devices that make images visible but technologies that depend on and produce important transformations in the urban environment. Challenging the assumption that cinematic reception was primarily defined by the homogenous darkness of a black box, the book calls instead for examining the significant urban, infrastructural, and social dimensions of screen practices by reconstructing the lives of buildings in five cities: Paris, Casablanca, Berlin, São Paulo, and New York. Confronting a legacy of modernist antipathy to movie houses, which have been typically dismissed as an architecture of theatricality and surface, the book brings to light a less evident aspect of the century’s screen architecture—its role in configuring and controlling circulation.
The new architecture of the screen was fundamentally about creating pathways that incited, articulated, and coordinated the movement of spectators and of celluloid media. Such an architecture was defined by the contradictory task of connecting the incompatible: of reconciling access and enclosure, of joining busy and congested streets to the controlled conditions of auditoriums. Architects were expected to create smooth and spectacular conduits toward the screen, while also enabling these to be staggered, differentiated, and surveilled. Buildings were expected to rivet the attention of passing crowds and assemble urban audiences on a vast new scale, yet they were also instruments for categorizing, segregating, and excluding spectators based on race, class, religion, or gender. Exploring the screenscapes of colonial-era Casablanca, this talk brings to light spaces that were at once key nodes within a culture of urban segregation as well as loci for acts of subversion and resistance.
Craig Buckley is an associate professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture at Yale University. He is the author of Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s and the editor or co-editor of Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, After the Manifesto: Writing, Architecture, and Media in a New Century, Utopie: Image, Text, Project 1967-1978, and Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.