Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942 by Ariel Rogers

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.2021.0094

1097-3729

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Reviewed by: On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942 by Ariel Rogers Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (bio) On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942 By Ariel Rogers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 320. On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942 By Ariel Rogers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 320. For most film histories, the screen in the mainstream movie theater is a singular object, albeit one that forms the most important part of the apparatus. As the canons of film history and theory insist, unified spectators gaze upon a single screen that immerses them cohesively. And according to this standard narrative, once the digital era comes roaring to life, screens proliferate while spectators' attention splinters. Yet, as Ariel Rogers masterfully demonstrates in her impeccably researched book, On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942, this is less a historical truth than a vestige of approaches that have sidestepped a wealth of material evidence. The spatial configurations that Rogers turns up are proof of a synthetic approach to screens in the "long 1930s" that valued flexibility, transparency, synchronization, and mobility. By attending to special effects—especially rear projection, where previously shot footage is projected on a screen behind a live actor performing in front of the camera—in Hollywood studios, theatrical technologies, and domestic projection, Rogers traces the beginnings of multiple screens, so familiar in the contemporary moment, to a seemingly unlikely birth nearly a century ago, when an American economic nadir met a zenith of production and exhibition experimentation. One of the major developments of special effects technology in the 1930s was a superior approach to compositing. Earlier in the twentieth century, composite shots, or images that involved shots made on at least two separate occasions and were later composited together, could be achieved through in-camera solutions or primitive optical printers. But in the early 1930s, Linwood Dunn at RKO patented the Acme-Dunn Optical Printer. It ensured far smoother combinations—or, as Rogers might define it, multiple synthesized images. Dunn's achievements aided in creating many of the most memorable images from the wildly successful King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933), as did the miniature rear projection that famously allowed stop-motion puppets to appear to inhabit the same space as live actors like Fay Wray. King Kong's screens—the multiple screens of the optical printer, the cellulose acetate screens on animation tables that showed miniaturized actors, or the theatrical screens on which it awed audiences—form a roadmap for Rogers' argument. An apparent cohesion is, for Rogers, the product of a multiplicity of screens operating simultaneously. Kong makes a particularly good example for Rogers' secondary points because of its well-documented problematic approaches to race and gender. [End Page 646] King Kong has frequently been interpreted as a colonialist fantasy of racialized male sexuality, while Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) is the white female object of desire. Rear projection's multiplied screens meant Fay Wray performed separately from the Kong puppet. Yet final composited images showed them inhabiting the same space, even touching. As such, rear projection both encouraged and precluded Kong and Ann's embrace and thus miscegenation itself, uncovering how effects technologies buttressed damaging American ideologies. In the bulk of the book, Rogers looks to mainstream exhibition practice between 1926 and the very early 1940s. There, she finds abundant evidence that a "logic of proliferating surfaces" was nascent long before digital histories tend to credit (p. 62). Early—and generally failed—attempts at widescreen are given due attention, as are the Trans-Lux theaters, which relied on rear projection at the moment of exhibition to showcase news-reels in illuminated theaters. Deep dives into the multiscreen structures of theaters like the Los Angeles and the RKO Roxy support Rogers's assertion that screens not only served to keep spectators stilled and quiet. They also facilitated movement through and around the theater building, generally for concession sales. A turn toward the "extratheatrical" (following Haidee Wasson) in the last chapter turns the book's argument in a surprising direction: toward the connections between filmic and televisual watching. Rather than maintain stringent medium specificity, Rogers...