In the 1920s, music halls and theaters, which had until then been predominant, gradually gave way to a new form of leisure, the experience of the moving image : cinema. More profitable due to the reproducibility of the medium, already an early form of dematerialization, cinema led to the acquisition and gradual conversion of former independent venues by emerging entertainment magnates.
To attract millions of spectators and to “create the psychological conditions of dream and travel,” the emerging major studios, often inspired by the great European operas and theaters, built hundreds of auditoriums in a decorative escalation that was both eclectic and monumental.
Cinema quickly became a dominant form of leisure and a mass culture: at once a creator and a vehicle of American mythology, a witness to and an actor in the national narrative, it established itself as an essential component of American identity. These movie theaters thus became lasting landmarks, inscribed both in the mental landscape of spectators and in that of American cities.
With the arrival of television in the 1950s, and the increasing individualization and dematerialization of modes of distribution, the very concept of the movie theater began to decline. Within a few decades, society shifted from a form of leisure based on an essentially collective and immobile experience to an individualized and mobile one: from movie palaces seating more than 3,000 people, to streaming platforms, and ultimately to the screens of our smartphones.
For fifteen years, we traveled through these emblematic sites which, when they were not abandoned or transformed into hybrid ruins, were converted into storage spaces, shops, churches, or parking lots, functioning like a subconscious memory, a chimera made of our past fantasies and our present condition.
This work, started in 2005, has been published in the book "Movie Theaters" by Prestel in 2021.
