Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater Author(S): Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece Source: Film History , Vol

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Smoke and Mirrors: Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater Author(s): Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece Source: Film History , Vol. 28, No. 3, Objects, Exhibition, and the Spectator (2016), pp. 85- 113 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.28.3.05

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms JOCELYN SZCZEPANIAK-GILLECE

Smoke and Mirrors: Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater

ABSTRACT: This essay traces cinephilia’s romance with cigarettes, cigars, and pipes through the history of smoking in American midcentury theater exhibition. From smoking lounges to ashtrays to drive-ins to 1950s loge sections, smoke’s relationship to the cinema signifies film’s strange materiality and immateriality in projection and exhibition. The forbidden pleasure of the cigarette hints at multiple layers of cinematic experience: exhibition’s relationship to fantasy and Barthesian erotics, discourses of class and gender, elitism and intellectual sophistication, and a history of nostalgic cinephilia that drapes theatrical spaces in sensory remnants.

KEYWORDS: spectatorship, exhibition, smoking, movie theaters, cinephilia

NOSTALGIA AND THE SMOKING CINEPHILE In my moviegoing teen years in Baltimore, frequently spent at the Charles The- ater, I often saw an antismoking PSA starring John Waters.1 While reminding audiences that smoking was prohibited in the theater, Waters could be seen smoking—and eventually French inhaling—a cigarette, proclaiming its wonder- ful taste and distinct joys. Not even during a European film, Waters explained, could one enjoy a cigarette and a movie at the same time, nor meld the two desires into a hypnopompic high. While emphasizing the cigarette’s taboo, the thirty-second announcement also played on the inexorable link between the pleasure of film and the pleasure of smoking. Although cigarettes were banned in most movie theaters by the 1990s, they were then and still are indisput- ably entangled with cinema: classical Hollywood’s collaborations with tobacco companies, the indelible image of a haze of smoke caught in a projector beam, Marlene Dietrich’s Concha Perez smoking seductively on the cigarette-factory set in Devil Is a Woman (1935), Bette Davis and Paul Henreid’s sublimation of sexuality with his lighting of her cigarettes in Irving Rapper’s 1942 Now, Voyager,

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Fig. 1: Monsieur Oscar in Holy Motors (2012) the languid lovers smoking nights away in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000).2 There is an intense and rich pattern here, one that could be easily elucidated through the aesthetic history of cinematic cigarettes: erotics and longing, the peculiar forbidden desires of the body and the eye that hint at the mysterious ties that bind film and smoking. Perhaps what Waters cheekily, subtly reminded us in his antismoking PSA was that the mainstream movie theater is also no place for flagrant flagrante delicto—and what a shame he finds that to be. More recently, 2012’s Holy Motors features small paeans to smoking amid its mourning of cinema’s passing era (fig. 1). In Leos Carax’s ode to the pleasures and mysteries of a disappearing mode of film watching, Monsieur Oscar smokes between his scenes with the languid fury of a thousand deceased cinemagoers. Granted, Oscar is French, and his habit recalls a multitude of stars and directors steeped in coolness: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Godard, Melville. Yet Holy Motors is less about a specific film or films than the process of watching a film; Carax opens in a darkened theater, and Oscar smokes while waiting to per- form his various roles. Because Holy Motors mourns a general legacy of watching in addition to filmic specificity, Oscar’s smoking suggests not just a nostalgic desire for Dietrich, Davis, and Henreid, but for our own triumphant return to a more reverential, more immersive, and more contemplative filmgoing experience. In watching Holy Motors, not only do we long for the dissipating practice of submission to a projected image, but, alongside Oscar, or whoever he happens to be playing, we delight in defying contemporary illuminated directives not to smoke in the theater. If Holy Motors means to circuitously evoke the feeling of watching movies while watching a movie, that is, a potentially misplaced

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 87 cinephilic nostalgia for an audience cowed at the powers of the all-encompassing film, then it assumes the need for a smoke. This European film, at least, leans on the impact of a simple object—the cigarette—as a shortcut to its cinephilic reverie. There are, of course, many objects associated with the movie theater that pique the cinephile’s interests and announce to her that the film is happening: curtains, organs, popcorn, seats, ticket stubs, even gum trodden into well-worn floors. Few of these, however, are as imbued with enigma as the cigarette and its resultant smoke; few other tactile items share such abstracted and indelible characteristics with film itself. Like popcorn, cigarettes have an often unwel- come ability to spread across the sensory surround, insisting on their presence even to those who might not appreciate their pleasures.3 Also like popcorn, cigarettes’ odorous tendrils claim spaces for themselves, frequently winning aromatic battles waged against weaker fragrances: perfumes, cleansers, spilled Coca-Cola. Yet the cigarette’s message is also a visual one that hangs whitely in the air; and here, the cigarette recalls the beam of the projector. Like that light emitted forth into the darkened auditorium, a cigarette’s plume is both volumetric and weightless, both heavy and floating. Like the luminescent spill from a projected film, a cigarette spreads throughout the room in which it is smoked. Like film, the cigarette is an experience at once individual and commu- nal, private and public. For these reasons, the cigarette is an object that belongs uneasily to spectatorship—because it looks beautiful on 35mm film; because its defining vices suit noir femme fatale, murderous rampager, and lost teenage soul alike; but also because it is an allegory for the cinematic experience. In repeating the trope of the cigarette in what is an undeniably metamovie, Carax quotes not only the history of films but also phenomenological and metaphor- ical histories of film watching. Regardless of whether we are loath to admit it, regardless of their recalcitrant perils, cigarettes have always helped define what it means to see a movie. The cigarette has long been associated with the theatrical spectator—or, more specifically, the currently endangered cinephilic spectator. As early as 1996, Susan Sontag identified one possible death of cinema, citing the “radically disrespectful of film” experience of domestic viewing as an indication that “perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia—the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired.”4 Cinema, she argued, served a pedagogical modeling function: “Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve.” For Sontag, then, learned behavior in the theater was as essential as the film; sharing that space with fellow spectators, mimicking together the patterns elucidated onscreen

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 88 and in the auditorium, is one of the formative contracts of cinephilia. As theo- rists such as D. N. Rodowick have observed while mourning the end of cinema, one of the ways in which film’s alleged disappearing act can be monitored is through the shift in viewing patterns from the theater to the home.5 All at once, we lose the tangibility of indexical 35mm film, the state of cinephilic reverie, and the experience of watching in public with others. To smoke in the movie theater, then, not only references the addictive nature of the act of smoking but further elucidates the bodily experience of cinephilic filmgoing: the tension between one’s own body and other bodies, the ephemeral sensory surround, the dream- like auditorium cocoon, the resonance of smoking in the auditorium with erotic pleasure, and the loss implied by the contemporaneity of both indoor smoking bans and dissipated audiences in the era of home viewing. To determine the influence of the cigarette on film watching, then, we should turn not only to the movies themselves but to their place of exhibition. Throughout the history of American film exhibition, cigarettes, smoke, and cigars have played many roles and evoked many concepts: women, men, aesthetic pleasure, vice, danger, comfort, domesticity, distraction, contemplation. As Richard Klein would have it, cigarettes are also sublime, not in spite of but due to their associations with mortality—and here, the cigarette again meets the cinema under the auspices of contemporary film theory.6 To smoke in the theater might therefore invite a doubled sense of sublimity, or, per Roland Bar- thes, a doubled erotics.7 For Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the cigarette, the pipe, and the cigar—tobacco in general—have a long association with a relaxed body and a contemplative mind.8 But these flights and histories are not so far from the ways in which exhibitors described the cigarette, the cigar, and smoke. After all, cigarettes’ associations with death arose not merely from the smoker’s health but also the threat of fire, a near-constant danger in projection through the 1950s.9 As for the cigarette’s aesthetic and visceral purposes, art-house cinemas, particularly those during the second wave of cinephilia, celebrated and even provided free cigarettes, while midcentury mainstream theaters encouraged visitors with smoking sections furnished with living room–like chairs.10 The cigarette, in fact, is one of the most multifaceted and complex objects necessary for understanding American spectatorship, even though smoking in the theater tended not to be nearly as prevalent as we now assume it to have been. Mad Men’s third episode from season 7, where Don Draper smokes while watching Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, exemplifies our current nostalgic assumption that an auditorium filled with smoke was de rigueur for midcentury movie- goers. Yet despite such pervasive imagery, cigarettes and cigars were typically highly regulated in the cinema and often banned entirely. The reason was simple enough: fire was a constant threat posed to exhibition, and smoking served only

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 89 to enhance the potential dangers of nitrate film prints (which were still in use through the early 1950s), hot and unstable projector lights, and heavy fabric draperies, curtains, and seat cushioning.11 Smoking gave credence to exhibitors’ most palpable fear: fire. As a result, theater smoking lounges were often outfit- ted with asbestos cement mixtures or materials such as Haskelite Phemaloid, a paneling consisting of amboine, mahogany, or walnut wood veneers adhered to fire-resistant laminate bases.12 Lounges also boasted furniture such as chro- mium metal tables with tops treated to resist burns, or micarta or formica tops “for the impatient one who uses a table top for an ashtray (and supply plenty of ash stands and sand urns, since your carpet is too valuable to be burnt and scarred).”13 Beyond the smoking lounge, however, fire in the main area of the theater was owners’ “most dreaded catastrophe”; indeed, in the 1930s, the pro- scenium wall was not merely a vestige of the live theater, but also a potential fire barrier that could be made all the more effective with steel or asbestos curtains.14 Despite our fervent romantic desires, generally speaking, smoking was simply too risky to allow throughout the entirety of the auditorium. Risk, then, is one side of cigarettes’ story in exhibition; a manifold signifying power encompassing class, gender, economics, and aesthetics constitutes another. SMOKING, EFFICIENCY, AND WASTE In 1929, architect Lester Abel argued that the “theater of tomorrow” would find space to be a significant commodity when accounting for luxuries past the auditorium: “Space on the first floor is extremely valuable and the consequent result is to locate the main lounges, smoking rooms, cosmetic, wash and toilet rooms in the basement below the lobby.”15 While Abel was incorrect in his assessment that most American theaters would place smoking rooms in the basement, the main point here is his assumption that a smoking room would remain essential in the “theater of tomorrow” for two reasons: first, it illustrates that exhibitors as early as the late 1920s assumed that smoking would, in general, remain an activity located outside the auditorium, and second, that despite the cigarette’s removal from the screen area, smoking would continue to be interlocked with the cinematic apparatus in some capacity. Smoking appeared as important an activity to the space of the theater as consuming food and drink; in fact, a 1931 “automatic cinema” included cigarette and perfume machines; a photo machine; and candy dispensers “incorporating tests of skill.” Such machines were “built into the walls and the designs made to conform to the surroundings. They have proven quite a popular feature, show substantial profits, and are not offensive or ‘nickelodeon’ in appeal.”16 Into the 1930s, similar automated dispensers became more broadly in demand. Vending machines throughout North America offered small luxury items such as cigarettes, soap, towels, perfume,

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 90 and gum, in keeping with Depression tendencies toward minimal and affordable comforts when major purchases were impossible.17 Beyond obvious economic necessity, however, the new preponderance of vending machines spoke to the burgeoning importance of efficiency for theatrical efficacy. In short, cigarettes, candy, and personal-care dispensers were made to appear a part of the theater’s structural integrity—unobtrusive and undistracting to the eye, neither carniva- lesque nor reminiscent of the nickelodeon, but effectively streamlining profits from spectator’s body to exhibitor’s pocket. Cigarettes, therefore, while unal- lowable in many auditoriums or at least in outside balcony and loge smoking sections, maintained their position as an accoutrement acceptable to the point of standardized invisibility in the general cinematic environment. Like cigarettes, the theater was in the process of becoming a paragon of efficiency by midcentury—even though, also like cigarettes, it continued to be, if not directly opposed, not precisely in line with assembly-line productivity. As is the cigarette, the theater is a break from work, a delineated passage of time outside of social mores, and symptomatic of mental engagement rather than physical productivity. This is one of exhibition’s problems with the cigarette, and part of why the cigarette is such a lasting metaphor for cinema: the cigarette exists alongside rather than being complementary to efficiency, is somewhat uneasily feminine or feminizing, is an object of both erotics and memory, and suggests the brief cloudiness of vanished moments. Leslie Stern characterizes smoking in terms of its links to sexuality, personal history, and memory both national and specific, and therefore reiterates cigarettes’ long-standing erotic, cultural, and durational resonances with film.18 Yet the conceptual relationship between cigarettes and theatrical efficiency also references continuing associations between, on the one hand, cigar smoking and temporal waste of a kind primarily allotted to the bourgeoisie, and, on the other, cigarette smoking and modern adaptive competence evident in both higher and working classes. By the early 1900s, global colonization had led to tobacco’s status as the most widely grown nonfood agricultural product in the world; similarly, the advent of machine-manufactured cigarettes in the early twentieth century aided in tobacco’s concurrent colonization of international working-class respiration.19 The cigarette was both made on the assembly line and representative of new assembly-line temporalities, even in terms of pleasure. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cigarette represented a far more efficient means of smoking than, for example, the cigar; whereas the latter might take upward of thirty minutes to fully enjoy, the former’s pleasures could be terminated completely within five to ten minutes. Alongside travel by train, rapid communication, and, of course, the cinema, the cigarette stood for speed and immediacy in modernity, a quick and joyful jolt to the senses and then on with the day.20

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Yet, in keeping with Stern, the cigarette also maintained a strong link to reverie, to dream, to sleep, and to oral, sensory input that undermined its adher- ence to the built efficiencies of modernity. In 1857, Charles Baudelaire described the poet’s relationship to his pipe, to which he is sumptuously addicted. When despair—whether emotional or, more likely, from writer’s block—catches the artist, the pipe sweeps him up in its mystical embrace; the writer smokes, and his body and spirit calmed, “tonight all injuries are healed.”21 Here, for Baude- laire, smoking is an act of vice and succor, as well as one that is completely enmeshed with artistic sensibilities; the pipe immediately informs us “I am a writer’s pipe,” and therefore an object of comfort and inspiration. In pointing toward the cigarette’s association with dream and with sleep, Richard Klein quotes both surrealist poet Jules Laforgue’s 1880 poem “La Cigarette” and poet Charles F. Lummis’s “My Cigarette” from 1879; “La Cigarette” finds its narrator plunged into ecstatic states by “the blue meandering that/Twists itself toward the sky and puts me to sleep,” while “My Cigarette” ends in a gentle glide down- ward into serenity brought on by smoking’s reverie.22 Laforgue and Lummis were hardly alone in making these comparisons, or in linking the cigarette with ecstasy and artistic practice. As Patricia G. Berman has demonstrated, members of the decadent movement of the late nineteenth century such as Edvard Munch drew on mainstream pathological associations of the cigarette with social decay, mortality, amorality, and insanity to define their bohemian status.23 For them, the cigarette was at once an emblem of a nascent counter- culture and the visionary state from which artistic production emerges. Evok- ing the pleasure of the cigarette meant reference to the decidedly intangible, counterproductive, self-indulgent, and almost certainly unprofitable state of inspiration; smoke stands in for the countless moments wasted waiting for divine revelation to strike. The irony here, of course, is that as much as the cigarette is an icon of the modern velocity of pleasure, it possesses a concurrent opposition to efficiency. Rather than encouraging productivity, the cigarette promotes relaxation, self-reflection, and pause; the smoke break removes the worker from the workplace instead of maintaining him in his seat. Frederick Wilson Taylor’s institution of regulated smoke breaks illustrates the cigarette’s conundrum of efficiency and inefficiency: although a cigar break’s languid extravagance would be unheard of for the master of the assembly line, the very fact that a cigarette break must be a calculated and overseen temporality underscores the cigarette’s link to dream states at the expense of productivity. If it must be controlled in the workplace, it is, like eating or gossiping or resting, an object not of work but of leisure—feminized, at that, as cigarette breaks served the additional function of policing women workers’ conversations.24 The cigarette may be a swifter means

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 92 of achieving smoking’s comforting effects, yet its legacy is one of intellectual contemplation in addition to productivity; of relaxation rather than stress; of the easement of modern nerves; and of excess. None of these characteristics is of particular use in the fast-paced environment of modern labor. If, as Richard Klein describes, cigarettes are sublime, and if, as Philip Fisher explains, wonder replaces the sublime in modern artistic experience, then perhaps they are at once a shortening and thus modernization of an older aesthetic practice, and a reminder of the return of that practice in even the most seemingly new objects.25 Cigarettes therefore are objects both of modernity and of legacies of unproductive contemplation reaching back both to the aesthetes of the nineteenth century and to earlier philosophical traditions of the sublime vis-à-vis Kant and Burke.26 In its deliberate elision of productivity for the sake of the dream, smoking in the workplace, as well as the larger cultural sphere, is also a reminder of what Georges Bataille describes as “non-productive expenditure.”27 While Bataille argues that the evolution of wealth into twentieth-century global capitalism has reduced the visibility of orgiastic and conspicuous evidence of expenditure, waste still holds sway over economics; it has merely migrated to less pronounced and separate quarters, such as the jewels worn by the rich and attained at the cost of fortunes, expensive art collections housed in domestic buildings, and other excesses of ornamentation performed privately rather than publicly. Although Bataille does not list the sumptuousness of the ornamented movie theater in his examples, it resonates with the “unconditional splendor of material things” that seduce humanity toward a productivity that structures waste spent only on the rich.28 In mimicking the consumption that the wealthy continue to access, the movie palace similarly echoed their expenditure behind closed doors. Beyond excess performed by the privileged, however, Bataille points toward the one way in which humankind can fight its way out of the chains of repetitive output: the potential of insubordinate expenditure. Here, then, is additional explanation for the delineation of smoking spaces and times at work and at the movies: smoking is a demonstration of expenditure and coun- terproductivity in that it results only in odor and trash, it has direct negative consequences for physical health, and it provides a deliberate waste of time and energy for the ultimate purpose of nothing at all. If cigarettes and the cinema should not necessarily be construed as radical objects of liberation, smoking’s sequestration both at the theater and at the factory illustrates a consonant unsettled relationship to modern industry and economics shared with film. Both forms of wasting time at once possess specific boundaries and remind us of the risk of excess that constantly threatens to erode the supremacy of global capitalist structures.

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For these reasons, as well as profit and audience-draw rationale, cigarettes bear a particular affinity with the cinema: icons of modern velocity, of relaxed contemplation, and of temporal and bodily waste.29 Where the cinema is a place of technology and speed—shots and their shifted perspectives, mon- tage, and the capturing of temporal duration—it is also a sign of modernity’s less ingenuous side—the urban environment, the availability of photorealistic pornography and other vices, and the darkness of the theater easily given over to erotic entanglements. Pornographic theaters, most famously those of Times Square, clearly illustrate the potential for sexuality, mainstream and otherwise, in the cinema.30 Yet the cinema in general, and in particular its darkness, carries with it the insistent whiff of sex, one best described by Roland Barthes as a “dif- fused eroticism” housed in the theater’s delineated architectural boundaries, its preponderance of bodies, and its relaxation for bodily release: “it is because I am enclosed that I work and glow with all my desire.”31 Because I sit here, in a silent contract alongside these other bodies not of the domestic sphere, I am a doubled being, my “nose press[ed] against the screen’s mirror,” adhered to the points of light that dominate in the darkness: the screen, the projector beam, yet, for Barthes, inveterate smoker that he was, the glowing embers of cigarette end not above the audience’s heads, but among them. Cigarettes function like a film in an undecorated theater: they serve to propel the audience forward into the screen, they are at once a creature comfort and an erotic maneuver, and they conclude with nothing having been created but the wastes of smoky halos and trampled butts. Like Barthes’s spectator, they are doubled; in the cinema, a doubled sign for both the illicit forbidden, such as Henreid and Davis’s sexual encounters impossible to show under the Hays Code, for the relaxation of the body that encourages the expansion of the mind, like theatrical chairs that enable reclining posture and therefore deeper immersion, and for the com- panion erotics of being within the theater and departing it, like the spectator longing for a cigarette and finally lighting one while leaving the lobby. The complex erotic significations that cigarettes posed in the movie theater were similarly evident in the mutable relationship between smoking, women, and film. At the Brooklyn-Paramount, finished in 1929, a women’s retir- ing room that soothed the modern woman’s nerves was “where milady may find all the accessories of the older forms of luxurious comfort augmented by those of Queen Nicotine.”32 Such accommodation for female smokers as well as the florid feminization of nicotine itself illuminates the multiplicity of smoking’s potential meanings from a masculine activity to a potentially feminist, or at least feminized, one. Wolfgang Schivelbusch highlights cigarettes’ feminine symbolism: their delicacy, their plumes of gentle smoke, compared to the masculine heft of the cigar and the pipe. For Paul von Schönthan, the cigarette’s “aromatic,

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Fig. 2: Lucky Cigarettes advertisement, 1929 (From the collection of Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, tobacco.stanford.edu)

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 95 fleeting haze, vanishing in delicate rings and cloudlets, is the perfume of the boudoir,” a potential sensory pathway between the clothed woman in public and the postcoital sheets (fig. 2).33 Lucky cigarettes advertised their products to women in 1929 by insisting on smoking’s suitability for thinness: “To keep a slender figure,” one ad pointed out, “No one can deny . . . Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”34 Such marketing to women by tobacco companies made cultural sense. While smoking by women and children was considered vulgar in the late 1800s and early 1900s, by the 1920s women’s emancipation had led to an association of the cigarette with the modern woman and in particular the flapper.35 After admiring glamorous actresses such as Louise Brooks and Clara Bow smoking with abandon on the screen, women audience members could retire to gender-specific smoking lounges for their own luxurious encounter with Queen Nicotine. Later in the 1930s, American Tobacco would hire actresses such as Claudette Colbert for print advertising.36 By 1935, 18.1 percent of women in the United States smoked; rates were up by 25 percent during World War II.37 At once transgressive, political, sensual, and tranquilizing, the cigarette helped configure a new American woman both seduced by capital and consumed by carnality. In order to offer expanding numbers of smokers a place to enjoy their vice, urban theaters in particular in the late 1920s through the 1930s often provided smoking rooms near women’s and men’s bathrooms or off the foyer lounge (fig. 3, fig. 4). While men’s lounges tended to operate in relatively straightforward ways, the women’s smoking lounge proved to be an ambivalent space flickering between luxury and necessity, motherhood and sex, comfort and discretion. There, the cigarette’s environmental significance and play between strange attraction and lavish comfort offered further evidence of smoking’s continu- ally fraught semiotics. Similar to women’s complex cultural relationships with smoking, the lounges specified for their use fluctuated in connotation, often described in contradictory terms both of elegance and familial appeal. For example, the women’s smoking room at the Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach boasted “a rubber dado in ultramarine blue over which life-size monkeys are scrambling,” while the RKO Theatres in Cincinnati provided trained maids in the women’s room to help with packages and childcare, or “if necessary, light her cigarette, see that she is entirely comfortable, and render a number of other courtesies and attentions with due discretion and restraint.”38 Indeed, in maintaining specific and usually gendered smoking rooms, the difficulty between establishing cigarettes as erotic vices or as necessary creature comforts becomes even more evident. Smoking was both an available activity and one that should be kept at least somewhat discreet, particularly given the cigarette’s difficult relationship with women and sex.

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Fig. 3: Women’s lounge, Paramount Theatre, Oakland, CA, 1932 (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, HABS CAL, 1-OAK, 9–25)

The cigarette’s elusive syntax in modernity and in the mainstream theater thus unveils a constellation of contradictory meanings. Yet where this multifaceted position for the cigarette was ultimately most clearly in play was in the art-house cinema movement. There, the cigarette was not only a sign of class, gender, erotics, and comfort, but also one of taste and cultural capital. In the art house, smoking was consistently intertwined with coffee, hearkening back to Schivelbusch’s description of eighteenth-century smokers enjoying the twinned benefits of smoke’s relaxation and caffeine’s stimulation, as well as to the members of the decadent movement and their insistence on the aesthetic value of smoke.39 Where the pipe or cigar relaxed the body, coffee quickened the mind. Small wonder, then, that the art-house cinema would pick up on this longtime association in order to appeal to the elite and intellectual cinephile. SMOKING AND THE FIRST AND SECOND WAVES OF CINEPHILIA During the first wave of cinephilia, smoking and coffee together were particularly predominant in the art-house movie theater. Many provided cigarette machines or even free cigarettes in lounges in addition to widely promoted and/

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Fig. 4: Women’s smoking room in basement, Paramount Theatre, Oakland, CA, 1932 (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, HABS CAL, 1-OAK, 9–26) or free coffee. Michael Mindlin’s Fifth Avenue Playhouse, which opened in 1927, was among the first art houses to adopt the provision of free coffee and cigarettes; Mindlin’s outrageous profits—annually, approximately $100,000—not only resulted in the rapid expansion of the 1920s little-theater movement, but also the strong connection between caffeine, nicotine, and “film art.”40 The Little Carnegie Playhouse in 1928 Manhattan included a coffee lounge, art galleries, and a card room in its art deco, modernistic interior space (fig. 5).41 At the Cin- ema Art Guild in Chicago, operated in 1930 by the Motion Picture Theatre Guild (Philadelphia), theater space was set up in quite specific ways for funneling “intelligentsia” audience members from gallery space to lounge to auditorium. According to Douglas Fox and George Schutz, “what the management would have us do [is] stroll from lounge to lounge, observe the art works, have a cigarette and a cup of coffee ‘on the house,’ then wander into the auditorium for the screen performance.”42 The foyer contained a table stacked with magazines and cigarettes near displays of paintings and other art objects. Between the shorts and the feature, “a trailer announces an ‘interlude’ and invites those present to a stroll through the lounges, to read a bit or have a cigarette and a cup of coffee

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Fig. 5: The Little Carnegie Theatre lounge in Manhattan, NY, 1928 (Motion Picture News)

. . . One strolls, reads a bit, smokes a cigarette over a cup of coffee, then returns to his seat.”43 The Cinema Art Guild, like other Motion Picture Theatre Guild theaters, was designed to promote foreign films to discerning American audiences. In the Theatre Guild’s “House of Shadow-Silence” or the Little Theatre in Rochester, New York, patrons were similarly encouraged to enjoy cigarettes and coffee together, in a manner indicating a desire to draw on older aesthetic models for elite filmic audiences.44 While the Theatre Guild certainly associated cigarettes with comfort, in accordance with mainstream exhibition practice, an additional veneer of respectability was afforded to cigarettes in the art- house theater. There, cigarettes were bourgeois and sophisticated, both relaxing and enhancing of the filmic experience. The Panorama on Chicago’s north side reopened as the Little Theatre in 1929, riding the coattails of the little-theatre art-house movement and its successes such as the Little Theatre in Rochester. While Chicago’s Little Theatre showed standard Hollywood mainstream fare,

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Fig. 6: The Paris Theatre, Manhattan, NY, architectural rendering, Warner-Leeds Firm, 1948 (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University) it provided the expected art-house amenities of free coffee and cigarettes in an attempt to seduce similar elite, intellectual audiences.45 Associations of cigarettes with sophistication, discernment, and the art- house experience continued into the second wave of American cinephilia in the late 1950s and 1960s (figs. 6 and 7). After World War II’s conclusion and the American economic recovery, which reopened the floodgates of international film distribution, exhibitors such as New York’s Donald Rugoff, one of the most successful exhibitors on the circuit, opened luxurious theaters geared toward urban, urbane crowds. A second-generation art-house owner, Rugoff opened multiple theaters throughout New York, all of which showed art or foreign films and were often advertised together in local papers.46 Audiences at Rugoff’s chain tended to seek out racy European features such as Boccaccio ’70 (1962) and Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) (fig. 8). These films, in fact, were the first shown at Rugoff’s- Cin ema I and II, which opened on June 25, 1962, with exteriors and interior lobbies

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Fig. 7: Th e Paris Th eatre, Manhattan, NY, architectural rendering, Warner-Leeds Firm, 1948 (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University) designed by Abraham Geller and auditoriums designed by Benjamin Schlanger. Cinema I and II were the jewel of Rugoff ’s New York art-house empire; their rich detail included spectacular Poul Hennigsen Danish copper artichoke-style chandeliers, rotating art exhibitions in lobby galleries, lettering by Norman Ives, sculpture by Harry Bertoia and Stephanie Scuris, and an Ilya Bolotowsky mural. Along with expansive visual feasts in the form of modern interior design and art, in the Rugoff tradition the theaters off ered free coff ee in the lounge, provided by rolling carts in the auditoriums.47 Coff ee was served in streamlined Japanese blue cups with white saucers made by Miya, who also designed the round white ashtrays in the lobbies (fi gs. 9 and 10).48 While smoking was allowed in loge sections of both auditoriums, the connection between cigarettes and free coff ee was immediately evident in Geller’s use of the Miya brand for both coff ee service and ashtrays; both were visually connected, especially as the white bowl-like saucer refl ected the white bowl-like ashtray in a sensory manifestation of their companionship. Miya’s elegant, simple dishware and the homey ease of coff ee in a cup with a saucer also implied the connections 1950s and 1960s exhibitors sought to draw between theatrical and domestic spaces. At this midcentury moment, concurrent with the second wave of cinephilia, smoking was oddly synonymous with

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Fig. 8: Cinema I and II, New York, NY, 1962, photo by Alexandre Georges (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University) both sophistication and comfort, with being in one’s living room and with new definitions of American postwar wealth. Perhaps inspired by drive-in inventor Richard Hollingshead’s observation in 1933 that smokers could better enjoy ozoners than movie theaters, traditional exhibitors in the 1950s seeking to draw viewers from both televisions and outdoor screens latched onto smoking less as a vice than as a feature of the home available in the theater.49 In the early 1950s, television represented the threat of domestic comforts compared to theatrical amenities, and the difficulty for exhibitors in competing with the fact that “you can sit in your slippers, smoke a cigar and watch television without leaving your house.”50 Similarly, drive-in patrons could “do as they please within the dictates of decency in the privacy of their automobiles. They can shell and eat

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Fig. 9: Cinema I and II, New York, NY, 1962, photo by Alexandre Georges (Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University) roasted peanuts, smoke, hold a normal conversation, regulate ventilation, and relax in wider and more comfortable seats with more leg room than possible in an indoor theater.”51 As a result of these economic perils threatening traditional exhibition, many theater owners in the 1950s began to expand smoking sections in the auditorium into larger and more luxurious loges, replete with more space between seats, ashtrays, and “rocking” chairs.52 By creating specific smoking sections that not only promised the luxury of a cigarette but also wider and more comfortable seats and more space in general, theater owners could charge a premium for the loge and ensure new sources of profit in a desperate moment. During the first widespread period of television and domestic spectatorship, the loge came to “signify the ease and informality of a living room with its privilege to smoke while being entertained.”53 SMOKING, DOMESTICITY, AND SLEEP Into the 1960s, American theaters included loge sections to accommodate smokers and seduce them back into the theater. Loges tended to appear in theaters that also offered amenities borrowed from art-house theaters (and therefore from cinephilia), such as coffee, excellent projection, art exhibitions, and modern design. For some, such as Maurice Sornik’s glass-fronted six-hundred-seat

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Fig. 10: Cinema I and II, New York, NY, 1962, photo by Alexandre Georges (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University)

Pequa Theatre in Massapequa, New York, which opened in late 1960, loge sections accompanied technological perfection; the Pequa showed first-run, 70mm adult-oriented features and had a railed-in loge smoking section with forty inches between rows of seats compared to the rest of the theater’s thirty-six- inch spacing.54 Sornik’s Bayshore Cinema on Long Island (1962) also included a

JOCELYN SZCZEPANIAK-GILLECE | SMOKE AND MIRRORS

This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 104 loge with rocking chairs, extrawide arm rests, a seating width of twenty-two to twenty-four inches, and forty-two inches between rows compared to the main seating area’s respective twenty-one to twenty-two inches and thirty-seven inches of space.55 While Denver’s Cooper Theatre (Richard L. Crowther & Asso- ciates), originally constructed to project three-strip Cinerama and based on Melvin Glatz’s designs for the “Theatre of Tomorrow,” did not boast a smoking section, its designs did include a black slate patio for intermission smoking with a brick outdoor fireplace, a lighted fountain, and white concrete benches; all of the Cooper’s chairs were loge models to encourage a luxurious atmosphere.56 San Francisco’s Music Hall Cinema, opened in 1962 and targeted to “discrim- inating clientele,” included a loge in its relatively small setting of 364 seats.57 For these and many other theaters with loge sections, smoking was a signifier of taste corresponding to fluid modern design and erudite product. Even if the Bayshore neglected to show imported pictures, its owners drew on the markers of art theaters to mimic the rarified tastes of cinephilic clientele—and thereby purport to engage audiences of similarly culturally refined statuses. What domestic viewing lacked in refinement could be provided at both art and pseudoart theater alike, both of which paired the elegance of smoking with the glamour of cultural capital. Heywood-Wakefield’s Airflo seats were often installed in loge sections and tended to associate smoking with relaxation in their advertising; for instance, a 1953 advertisement for Airflo seats illustrated their level of comfort by the inclusion of a man smoking a pipe in a Heywood-Wakefield seat.58 Ver- sions of the Airflo name were not unique to Heywood-Wakefield’s theater seats; buffets, vanities, and shelving systems developed in the Airflo style from the late 1930s displayed swooping curves similar to those of Chrysler sedans.59 In theatrical smoking sections, though, the name took on additional significance beyond the aerodynamic implications of domestic furniture; there, the Airflos suggested in both name and shape smoke’s passage through space and the concurrent dreamy lightness of the spectator’s mind. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, loge sections containing chairs such as the Airflo cropped up across the American exhibition scene. Loges were considered appropriate both for “small, single-floor” theaters as well as “super-duper[s],” either of which could balance the joys of being out with the intimacy of domesticity by including a loge section.60 Alongside wide screens, loges seemed to draw new and returning attendees; as George Schutz noted in 1958, that ol’ rocking chair has got the public but good—with many people accustomed to enjoying a smoke while watching a show. Not everybody smokes, but millions of people do, and they can

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do so while sitting in front of that little box in the living room. Among comments of disappointment at the ending of telemovies at Bartlesville was the assertion that ‘it was nice to be able to enjoy a cigarette while seeing a picture.’ And this came from feminine members of the subscribing families. Even the ultimate in comfort is no longer a luxury known only to a few. For this, and the right to enjoy a cigarette, many people—and in America it is hard to tell in which income brackets you’ll find them—are willing to pay a premium. Thus the so-called loge now can lay material claim on a greater share of the seating scheme, and in the average theatre, too. Where there is no balcony or stadium, it may be feasible to set off a section of the main floor.61 Cigarettes, here, are democratizing—“even the ultimate in comfort is no longer a luxury known only to a few”—and able to move unexpectedly across gender boundaries—“this came from feminine members of the subscribing families.” That film and smoke are tied unquestioningly to one another suggests that, by midcentury, theater owners accepted their necessary relationship. Smoking in general, whether pipe, cigarette, or cigar, might result in greater enjoyment of the picture, but cigarettes in particular transcended class and gender borders. Those who enjoy a cigarette might be lower, working, middle, or higher classes; as Schutz notes, “in America it is hard to tell in which income brackets you’ll find them,” exemplifying smoking’s economic universality. Smoking’s claim to all members of the American populace not only cemented its status as a “right,” but also as indicative of American forms of democracy through purchasing power; if one wanted to enjoy one’s “right” to smoking’s pleasures in the theater, one must only be “willing to pay a premium” for the “ultimate in comfort . . . no longer a luxury known only to a few.” In their uneasy straddling of profit and aesthetic experience, movie theaters, which have never been bastions of health, have repeatedly found themselves in the strange position of, on the one hand, asserting their fami- ly-friendly space and, on the other, defending their audiences’ right to access experiences of vice or potential harm. Like the drive-in’s provision of both child-appropriate activities as well as private dark spaces for teenagers’ giddy sexual exploration, film exhibition has always been a place of ambivalent moral codes.62 Yet exhibition’s relationship to the cigarette in particular highlights not only the United States’ changing attitudes toward public health, but also the incalculable strangeness of smoke itself. Unlike eating or chewing gum or other modes of theatrical ingestion, smoking and its narcotic powers speak to film’s status as dream. In a 1951 advertisement in the Motion Picture Herald,

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Heywood-Wakefield reprinted Frederick C. Othman’s “A Movie Dream” from the New York World-Telegram & Sun. Othman’s grouse with movies wasn’t with the films themselves but the seats in which one sits: too close together, awkward, stiff, and uncomfortable. The new Airflo chairs, however, “like rocking chairs,” are made up of wide foam rubber with six-inch armrests and springs to imitate rocking chairs. In these miraculous chairs, one can eat, “sip highballs, and smoke. In the arm of every seat, is an ash tray . . . I’d never been so comfortable, except in bed. I had a smoke in one hand and a drink in another . . . I’ve never spent a pleasanter evening. If the picture hadn’t been good, it wouldn’t have mattered much. I’d have taken another drink and rocked myself to sleep” (boldface in original).63 Designed for the loge smoking sections, Airflo seats are here referred to as “Dream Chairs,” reflecting the strong connection certainly between smoking and relaxation, yet sliding into the realm of reverie. Smoking, it seems, not only comforts the patron but puts him or her into a state of dream- like passivity and impressionability. If film functions like a fantasy, smoking enhances the spectatorial dream state; here, it’s not merely a luxury, but an aid to achieving a kind of cinematic immersion akin to intoxicated sleep. Smoke is the opiate; film, the hallucination. Yet Othman’s statement suggests an additional shadow mode of spectatorship, one where film might constitute the opiate and smoking the dream. “If the picture hadn’t been good,” Othman notes, “I’d have taken another drink and rocked myself to sleep.” This is a curious statement indeed for an advertisement in a trade magazine: the Airflo’s appeal is not necessarily that it enhances the experience of the film, per se, but rather of the bodily succor promised by the combination of relaxing film and relaxing cigarette. Othman’s spectator appears wholly uninterested in the narrative direction of the movie; rather, his immersion is a physical release into . . . what, precisely? Pleasure? Sleep and the void? A vacation—in its literal sense—from the stiffness demanded by civil society? Othman’s pleasure seems located in the inarticulable: not quite cinematic, but verging on the passively erotic. It’s an entirely bizarre dream for the promotion of a theater seat; Othman is inattentive, lost to the world and thus to the world of advertising and profit, lost even to the film narrative. In the loge, in the Airflo’s wide and womb-like surround, smoke drifts in gentle waves, and Othman’s spectator is caressed, rocked, and welcomed into surrender. Film is the proxy; immersion into an isolated somatic moment is the ultimate goal. It’s achieved, unsurprisingly, through a heady combination of body position, dark space, projection, and smoke. Film and cigarette allow him access to a space of public sleep, a place where the rational is eliminated and the dream takes hold. Othman’s association of film, smoke, and sleep may seem the ramblings of a layabout, or simply exhibition’s cynical attempt to place bodies in the seats

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 107 at a moment of profit drain. Yet within Othman’s strange words lies a curious resonance with the potential exteriority of sleep and the dream state. Jonathan Crary has recently argued that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ unre- lenting positioning of human subjects in temporal relationship to the market has eroded our “natural conditions” in the world to such a great extent that sleep remains the only excess still untouched by capitalism.64 Dreams, for Crary, have undergone a profound stigmatization and privatization since the seventeenth century, most particularly in the wake of both the nascence of industrial modernity and publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams(1899); the dream became individual rather than collective, a repository of quotidian emotional waste and wish fulfillment rather than an imaginative and prophetic wellspring. Yet this negates the transindividual aspects of the dream state: how our dreams might envision a new collective way of living in the world, together, in harmonic community with vital structures of care. Sleep may remind us of death, but it also reminds us of our connection to the future, whether as simple as tomorrow morning, or as grand as an impossible social utopia that dissolves upon waking. Perhaps, Crary concludes, the sole means of dreaming a life outside global financial structures is in dreaming itself. Perhaps sleep is a contemporary revolutionary mode, or could constitute a principle of nonproductive expenditure outside the spiraling networks of late capitalism. If the picture was no good, Othman surmises, he would have taken a drink, inhaled a smoke, and rocked himself back to sleep—in public, among others, in a loge filled with fellow drifters sharing his “movie dream.” THE MOVIE DREAM After high points in the 1950s and early 1960s, exemplified by the noted prolifer- ation of loges in theaters across the country up through the 1960s, smoking rates in the United States began a steady decline; between 1964 and 1990, the number of cigarettes smoked per adult fell from 4,269 to 2,827, while rates of young male smokers dropped from 54.1 percent to 25.1 percent and those of young female smokers from 37.3 percent to 22.4 percent.65 From the mid-1970s on, theaters across the country followed the general trend in decreased cigarette usage by embarking on a slow process of eliminating smoking altogether. In keeping with smoking bans in general, this varied from city to city, state to state, and theater to theater depending on local laws, which continued to shift up through the 2000s.66 New York City’s Smoke-Free Air Act of 2002 and New York State’s Clean Air Act of the same year are often credited with hastening the process nationally; the ordinances, which went into effect in March 2003, completely banned smoking in all public enclosed areas, including former smoking lounges segregated from the rest of the building.67 In 2013, the New York City Council

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 108 approved extending the smoking ban to e-cigarettes, while the board of health approved a measure to ban sugary soda in cups larger than sixteen ounces in locations including movie theaters; the measure was met with significant resis- tance by exhibition and beverage groups, some of whom demanded audiences’ freedom to make their own decisions in rhetoric akin to cigarette lobbyists.68 After accessions to smokers in the early days of widespread television, cigarettes and their attendant haze have gradually disintegrated over the past several decades into the static fuzz of memory. Smoke’s vanished theatrical presence is now another contemporary example of the concurrent deaths of cinema and the cinephile’s dream. If both smoking rates and theatrical attendance have consistently eroded over the past several decades, recent discussions of transformed cinephilia have marked a resurgent interest in what it means to succumb to the movies. Girish Shambu describes “new cinephilias” exploding across Internet culture, where an insistence on cinephilia’s sociable dimension offers a rejoinder to Sontag’s elegy.69 Such new cinephilias supply essential deuniversalizing visions of global cinephilia, where digitality no longer threatens but sustains filmic vitality. Yet for Francesco Casetti, film on DVD functions as a kind of “relic”—a fragment, if still a sacred one, of Sontag’s cinephilic experience, formerly housed within the holy theatrical building.70 If domestic viewing constitutes a spatial portion of an admittedly nostalgic version of cinephilia, is there a place for the far more endangered cigarette? Is the contemporary cinephile one who participates in a burgeoning social discourse, or one who returns to the slumbering abyss of private reverie? Perhaps it is in the very incommensurability of these questions where cigarette and film maintain a shared link with undirected states of being: both cinephilias still dream of a volitional place, where risk, excess, desire, and refusal are conditions to be freely chosen. Since long before smoking’s indoor regulation, film has been described as a dream; Hollywood, as anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker famously described it in 1950, is a “dream factory,” manufacturing the kinds of industri- alized reverie of which Crary is understandably wary.71 But if film is more than the sum of its profitable parts, perhaps its relationship to smoking is similarly more complex than threats to health and the dangers of fires. The cigarette, the pipe, and smoking have long held associations with film’s abstracted and incongruent sides: the sharing of temporal waste, inefficiencies in the midst of efficiencies, interruptions of regulated flows whether in terms of workdays or projector beams. The elimination of the cigarette from the theater, therefore, does not merely concern fire hazards and smoking restrictions but speaks also to the regulation of time and dream space in the theater. Immersion is now based on different principles that are not necessarily those of modernity or of

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This content downloaded from 128.95.232.169 on Wed, 06 May 2020 22:54:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 109 the cigarette, but instead concern complete bodily comfort and ingestion. If we are to mourn the passing of the cinema and cinephilia, perhaps we also should mourn the passing of the cigarette and our full acceptance of a 24/7 society, even in the space of the theater. When the cinephile thinks nostalgically of a smoke-filled theater, perhaps her desire is not only aesthetic but signals an unspoken, unconscious interest in a political mode of spectatorship. Perhaps the moviegoer who misremembers theaters drenched in smoke is a moviegoer who dreams, collectively, of a different way of existing in the world. For the cigarette is at once dream-like, wrong, prolific, countercultural, and vast. It spills out moments of lost time in heathered waves; like a memory returned to and repeatedly viewed, or like a film seen over and over in a cinephilic daze, a cigarette smoked is both the same as a previous cigarette and a new, dedicated experience. Film and cigarette: two emblems of modernity at its most paradoxically inefficient, its most unstably erotic, its most lasciviously counterproductive. Perhaps this, then, is the reason for exhibition’s unsettled relationship to the cigarette: beyond the sake of safety or clamoring audiences, beyond the cigarette’s undeniably adverse impact on public health, beyond the impact of smoke on the projector beam, smoking upends the theater’s relationship to efficient economics. The cigarette is a motif of waste in terms of labor, health, and temporality that reminds us of filmic experience’s incalculability, its unrefined pleasures, and the threat implied in its collective dreams. Smok- ing’s swathe of ashen damage is at once a token of danger and a signal of the corrosion that underlies even the most robust machineries of profit. Cigarette and film both may represent the culture industry at its most cynical, but their continued association also indicates small desires for an existence outside of regulation—even if only to dissipate within just a few, wasted moments.

Notes

1. The PSA was originally shot for the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles in the early 1980s in appreciation for their repeated showings of Pink Flamingos. 2. For information on Hollywood and tobacco companies, see K. L. Lum, J. R. Polansky, R. K. Jackler, and S. A. Glantz, “Signed, Sealed and Delivered: ‘Big Tobacco’ in Hollywood, 1927–1951,” Tobacco Control 17 (2008): 313–23. 3. Since popcorn’s nascent popularity in the early 1930s, its odor was considered a form of self- advertising. See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 79–80. 4. Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,”New York Times, February 25, 1996, https://www.nytimes .com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html. 5. See D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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6. Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 7. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” inThe Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 345–49. 8. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 9. “Storage and Handling of Processed Nitrate Film,” Kodak website, accessed March 20, 2015, http:// motion.kodak.com/motion/Support/Technical_Information/Storage/storage_nitrate.htm. 10. See, for example, George Schutz, “Theatre Seating in These New Times of the Business and the Art,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, July 11, 1959, 29–30. 11. Incandescent lights, steam pipes, cigarettes, and matches, all of which are hotter than 300 degrees Fahrenheit, were only some of the risks posed for the ignition of nitrate film. See A. H. Nuckolls and A. F. Matson, “Some Hazardous Properties of Motion Picture Film,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 27, no. 6 (December 1936): 657–61; “Progress in the Motion Picture Industry,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 15, no. 1 (July 1930): 68–123. 12. See Eugene Clute, “New Schemes in Remodeling,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, October 20, 1934, 11–62. 13. “Furniture for the Foyer and Lounge,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, November 13, 1937, 34–35; Madame Majeska, “Modernizing the Obsolete Interior,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, May 2, 1936, 9. 14. J. T. Knight Jr., “Planning for Safety,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, May 4, 1935, 12. 15. Lester A. Abel, “Planning the Motion Picture Theatre of Tomorrow,”Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, April 13, 1929, 22–68. 16. S. Charles Lee, “The Features of an Automatic Cinema,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, November 21, 1931, 25–138. 17. “Design of Small Motion Picture Theaters,”Architectural Record, June 1932, 40. 18. Lesley Stern, The Smoking Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Mark Jackson, “ ‘Divine Stramonium’: The Rise and Fall of Smoking for Asthma,”Medical History 54, no. 2 (April 2010): 171–94. 19. Claire Chollat-Traquet, Women and Tobacco (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1992), 4 20. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 115. 21. Charles Baudelaire, “The Pipe,” inLes Fleurs Du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine Press, 1982), 70. 22. Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime, 57, 53. 23. Patricia G. Berman, “Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette: Smoking and the Bohemian Persona,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993): 627–46. 24. See Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997), 304. 25. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 26. See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry

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into the Sublime and the Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998). 27. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” inVisions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985), 116–29. 28. Ibid., 128. 29. For an exploration of cinema’s ties to temporalities of modernity, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emer- gence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 30. See, for example, Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 31. Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” 346. 32. “Lounges for Modern Eyes and Nerves in Brooklyn-Paramount,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, January 19, 1929, 68–69. 33. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 125. 34. Ad for Lucky cigarettes, Stanford Research into the History of Tobacco Advertising, Stanford School of Medicine, accessed February 20, 2015, http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images .php?token2=fm_st045.php&token1=fm_img1093.php&theme_file=fm_mt014.php&theme_ name=Keeps%20you%20Slim&subtheme_name=Instead%20of%20a%20Sweet. 35. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise; Chollat-Traquet, Women and Tobacco, 4. 36. Lum et al., “Signed, Sealed and Delivered.” 37. Chollat-Traquet, Women and Tobacco, 5. 38. “An Auditorium Painted with Light,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, May 30, 1936, 11; “Soliciting Feminine Patronage with Lounges and Trained Maids,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, February 6, 1937, 49. 39. Schivelbusch, “Tobacco: The Dry Inebriant,” inTastes of Paradise, 96–146. 40. Tony Guzman, “The Little Theatre Movement: The Institutionalization of the European Art Film in America,” Film History 17, nos. 2–3 (2005): 271. 41. Ibid., 276. 42. Douglas Fox and George Schutz, “The ‘Cinema Art Movement’ and its Newest Theatre,”Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, January 18, 1930, 15. 43. Ibid., 54–57. 44. “Little Theatre in Buffalo,”Buffalo (NY) News, August 13, 1929, 14; “Little Theatre Opens Thursday, Sept. 19,” Buffalo (NY)-Courier Express, September 15, 1929, 14. 45. Guzman, “The Little Theatre Movement,” 281. 46. “Cinema I-Cinema II: Two-in-One Cinema,” Interiors, November 1962, 124–27; Archer Winsten, “Rages and Outrages,” New York Post, April 9, 1962, 88. 47. The Walter Reade Organization’s 1960s art theaters similarly tended to serve free coffee to patrons in elegant, stylish surroundings; their Charles Cinema in Boston, opened in 1967, included Cory coffee machines in the lobby as well as Automaticket machines, Finnish tapestries, and a specially commissioned teakwood Edward Movitz sculpture. “New Reade Theatre in Boston,”Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, June 21, 1967, 19–20.

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48. “Cinema I-Cinema II: Two-in-One Cinema,” 124–27. 49. Quoted in Mary Morley Cohen, “Forgotten Audiences in the Passion Pits: Drive-In Theatres and Changing Spectator Practices in Post-War America,” in “Audiences and Fans,” ed. John Belton, special issue, Film History 6, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 473. 50. Benjamin Schlanger and William Hoffberg, “Effects of Television on the Motion Picture Theater,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers 56, no. 1 (January 1951): 43. 51. Charles R. Underhill Jr., “The Trend in Drive-In Theaters,”Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers 54, no. 2 (February 1950): 162. 52. See Schutz, “Theatre Seating in These New Times of the Business and the Art,” 29–30. 53. Ibid. 54. “Small Suburban Theatre with Novel Seating Scheme,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, April 15, 1961, 32–33. 55. “An Indoor Theatre Adjoining Drive-In,”Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, August 8, 1962, 41–43. 56. “The Cooper in Denver,”Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, June 17, 1961, 38. 57. “San Francisco Cinema,” Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, May 16, 1962, 24. 58. Ad for Heywood-Wakefield Airflo seats,Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, September 5, 1953, 53. 59. Mary Daniels, “Heywood-Wakefield, Fair-Haired Furniture of the ’40s and ’50s, Enjoys a New Boom Era,” Chicago Tribune, October 2, 1994. 60. Schutz, “Theatre Seating in These New Times of the Business and the Art,” 29–30. 61. George Schutz, “Seating—One of the Theatre’s Big Three,”Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, July 12, 1958, 24. 62. See, for example, Cohen, “Forgotten Audiences in the Passion Pits,” 470–86. 63. Ad for Heywood Wakefield Airflo seats,Motion Picture Herald, Better Theatres section, October 13, 1951, 3. 64. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 65. Fred C. Pampel, Tobacco Industry and Smoking, rev. ed. (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 35. 66. Chris Weller, “New York’s Indoor Smoking Ban Hits 10–Year Mark: Where Do Other States Stand on the Issue?,” Medical Daily, July 22, 2013, http://www.medicaldaily.com/new-yorks-indoor-smoking -ban-hits-10-year-mark-where-do-other-states-stand-issue-247894. 67. “New York City Smoke-Free Act of 2002,” New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/smoke/tc5.pdf. 68. Scott Neuman, “New York City Extends Smoking Ban to E-Cigarettes,” The Two Way (blog), Decem- ber 19, 2013, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/19/255582225/new-york-extends -smoking-ban-to-e-cigarettes; Jordan Zakarian, “NYC Sugar Soda Ban Threatens Movie Theater Reve- nue,” Hollywood Reporter, September 13, 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nyc-sugar -soda-ban-threatens-movie-theater-370190; Gregg Kilday, “Movie Theater Owners Fight Back Against Mayor Bloomberg’s ‘Nanny Approach’ Soda Ban,” Hollywood Reporter, June 1, 2012, http://www .hollywoodreporter.com/news/mayor-bloomberg-large-soda-ban-movie-theater-owners-332168. 69. Girish Shambu, The New Cinephilia (Montreal: Caboose, 2014).

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70. Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 71. Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, The Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie- Makers (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950).

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is an assistant professor of English and film stud- ies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She received her PhD in screen cultures from Northwestern University in 2013; she is completing a book man- uscript on architect Benjamin Schlanger. Her articles have appeared in Screen, World Picture, 2ha, and Color and the Moving Image.

JOCELYN SZCZEPANIAK-GILLECE | SMOKE AND MIRRORS

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