Critical Inquiry — Volume 34, Number S2

Elizabeth Abel

Double Take: Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater

No doubt the darkened room and the screen bordered with black like a letter of condolences already present privileged conditions of effectiveness—no exchange, no circulation, no communication with any outside. Projection and reflection take place in a closed space, and those who remain there, whether they know it or not (but they do not), find themselves chained, captured, or captivated.
—Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970)

We always entered the side door of the theater, the one reserved for blacks, and invariably sat in the balcony, thus segregated from the whites.… We sat in the same place—the front row of the balcony—and propped our feet on the banister while watching the movies. When the pictures were boring, we would throw popcorn, empty soft-drink cups and water on the whites seated below. We got a big kick out of that.
—Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return (1973)

Who is more captive in these accounts: the African American spectators channeled from the theater’s side door to its segregated balcony where, at a remove from the cinematic scene, they can exercise their opinions and their limbs, or the unmarked spectators at liberty to sit where they choose in the hermetically sealed and darkened cave in which they are severed from the outside world and chained to the flickering images on the screen? Or, to pose the question differently, why are boredom and bad movies imaginable only from the balcony?

Elizabeth Abel is professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989) and Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (2008), the editor of Writing and Sexual Difference (1982), and the coeditor of The Voyage In (1983) and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997).