ABSTRACT

As one of a handful of prominent architecture firms specializing in the emerging field of movie-theater design in the early nineteen teens, the work of the architecture firm Rapp and Rapp for Balaban and Katz played a seminal role in the transformation of nickelodeon into the movie palaces of the late teens and twenties. The styles of architecture vary, but are all permeated with a touch of the Orient, which has always been brightly colorful, emotional and almost seductive in its wealth of color and detail. The addition of a narrator and/or musical accompaniments to early silent film screenings would soon go some distance toward remediation of the type of dialogical involvement with silent films that purportedly disturbed and depressed Maxim Gorky. In contrast to the cinema of attractions, narrative cinema willfully collapsed the space the former confronted and effectively constituted as distance between the screen and the audience.