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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathGraham
 
 
 
 
 

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or not a film sequence is very bright) can look through the projection wall at the cinema audience. In contrast, the side walls of two-way mirror glass do not allow the passerby to see inside during a film screening, since the streets are normally more strongly lit than the interior of a cinema is by the film projection, so that the glass façade becomes a mirror from the outside. Before and after each film screening, however, the movie audience inside can be seen as it disperses or assembles anew.

For the film spectator inside the cinema, the situation is reversed. During the film screening, the spectator not only sees the normal film image on the projection screen, but can also obtain a weak impression of life on the street and the architectonic surroundings outside the cinema through the two-way mirror glass on the sides. Before and after the screening, the spectator sees himself and the other cinemagoers in the reflecting screen, and knows, at the same time, that these mirrors are transparent from the outside. The situation is thus structured so that two kinds of voyeurism, that of the film spectator and the «normal» sort—the observation of a «live»

 

situation—are linked architecturally to one another. [2]

In an essay entitled «Theater, Cinema, Power,» [3] Graham relates his work «Cinema» to the history of Western theater and clarified the essential historical approaches and «points of crystallization.» The following phenomena are mentioned in this context by him: the emergence of the theater as an architecturally closed form in the Renaissance, in which the ideal city was represented on the stage; «life as theater» at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV (a curator, Rüdiger Schöttler utilized this historical reference, in combination with Graham’s cinema model, for the concept of an independent exhibit); [4] the «cinemized» theater of the 1920s (Gropius-Piscator, Lissitzky-Meyerholdt, Kiesler and others) as well the plans for «Cineac,» a cinema designed in 1934 in Amsterdam by the Dutch Architect J. Duiker, from which Graham typologically derives his «Cinema;» and finally—as a historical reference to the present—the fact that a former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, became president of a superpower. The question of the interrated relationship between political power and the institutionalized use of media connects these

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