Movie theater design in the United States underwent a profound transformation in the early 1930s. The picture palaces of the preceding decade were gradually supplanted by a new generation of streamlined movie theaters that bore little resemblance to their elaborately decorated and quintessentially exotic predecessors. A leading voice in the call for change was Benjamin Schlanger – a young architect who would devote his entire career to the cause, becoming an international expert on movie theater design in the ensuing four decades. To date, his pioneering work and the many projects and articles that followed have not received the full attention and recognition they rightly deserve. Schlanger's name does not readily appear, if at all, in the different anthologies of the twentieth-century American architecture. Neither has the history of movie theater design in the United States since the 1930s received the same degree of attention that other building types or, for that matter, the movie palaces have. The relative formal austerity of the movie theatres in vogue since the 1930s, which the author terms the “neutralized theatre,” may well appear to leave little to be said about their ascetic design. This book does much to dispel this misperception.

The Optical Vacuum marks a significant step forward in focussing attention on the work and the important contributions of Benjamin Schlanger to movie theater design for nearly half of the twentieth century. However, this book is, to its credit, neither a monograph on Ben Schlanger nor a formal history of movie theater design in the United States. It sets out to demonstrate why “extra-textual filmic space must be included in a fuller definition of film spectatorship,” and how not only “space constructs us as spectators, but also that spectatorial space shapes cinema's role in the larger cultural imaginary” (10). To these ends, the text systematically weaves the discussion of Schlanger's contributions with broader theoretical reflection on cinephilia and the role of architecture and space in the constitution of the modern spectator.

The movie theater design transformations of the 1930s are commonly attributed to a wider and all-encompassing stylistic shift to the “modern architecture” or the “international style” that culminated in the post-World War II era. The author upholds this orthodoxy and seeks to specifically link Schlanger's work in the 1930s to the work of the French architect Le Corbusier from the 1920s. Even though the formal vocabulary of Schlanger's pioneering Thalia Theatre of 1932 and similar period examples is more accurately categorized as art deco or streamline moderne than Le Corbusian, Schlanger was quite adamant that his cause was not stylistic per se. Concerned as he was with the spatial characteristics and the formal vocabulary of the movie auditorium – a vocabulary only visible before and after the movie screening, and there to contextualize the event without impinging on it – his primary and lifelong preoccupation was with the creation of a different, immersive experience of the movies in the auditorium. To that end, he specifically focussed on the questions of sightlines, interior lighting, the elimination of the proscenium, and alternative solutions to the problem of screen masking and screen size. These concerns in turn inform the chronological organization of the book, with specific chapters on optics and the demasked screen (1932–52), followed by neutralization in the era of widescreen (1950–60), and the concluding chapter on the art house and the underground cinema movement of the 1960s.

Schlanger's intent behind the various alternatives to screen masking in the 1930s and 1940s was to transform the filmic image, the author contends, from a distanced “picture in a frame” to an immersive “window onto a world” (106). The widescreen experiments of the 1950s in turn extended that objective into “a vision of virtual disembodied travel, much like that exemplified by the experience of the car” (106). The “realism” of the visual experience that the widescreen and the automobile windshield offer in tandem is accompanied, we are told, by “an elusive spectatorial distance from what is seen” (106). This latter underscores why the reach for a total immersive experience that culminated in the type of auditorium design Schlanger called – in a play on the word “proscenium” – the “transcenium” would prove to be “an impossible illusion never fully attainable but always desired” (85).

The ensuing 1960s art house and underground art cinema movements mark for the author “a moment of cinephilia in ruins: the decay of one mode of being, and the birth of another” (159). The cinephilic ideal of “immersion, contemplation, and community” that are said to characterize the movie theaters of the preceding three decades would be supplanted with one predicated, we are told, on “comfort, glamor, and individual attention” (150). Even though the neutralization of the movie theater thus faded, the contradictory desires to construct and to liberate the spectator that shaped it, the author assures us, live on.