Getting toGoing to the Show

Abstract

This paper asserts the need for a scholarly and teaching practice that tries to understand cinema as experience: a set of processes, practices and relationships associated with but not reducible to films. It further calls for reimagining the history of cinema as the history of the experience of cinema, and for a corresponding historiographic practice that, however problematically, attempts to represent that which is representable about cinema as experience. Going to the Show (www.docsouth.unc.edu/gtts) is a digital library project that documents and illuminates the experience of moviegoing in North Carolina between 1896 and 1930. Information about and content associated with more than 1300 cinema venues in operation across 200 communities in the state are displayed upon more than 1000 geo-referenced urban ground plan maps. A number of historiographic questions arise from this experiment in the historical geography of cinema: How has the experience of cinema, particularly the experience of moviegoing, been documented? How might this evidence be represented and manipulated in an interactive digital library? What aspects of the experience of moviegoing are highlighted in these representations and what aspects are obscured or remain unrepresentable? What is the historiographic and epistemological status of ‘knowledge’ that might be generated from such data-rich projects? Going to the Show demonstrates that the early experience of cinema in North Carolina can only be understood within its urban spatial context. For most of the history of cinema in North Carolina, the experience of cinema was part of the experience of ‘downtown’: the dense cluster of commercial, social and civic real estate that formed the heart of every town. This project also underscores the determinative role of race in the experience of moviegoing for all North Carolinians between 1896 and the desegregation of white theatres in the early 1960s.

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