A Governmental Contest: Regulating US Cinema during the Progressive Era

Eric Olund
Additional contact information
Eric Olund: Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TN, England

Environment and Planning A, 2010, vol. 42, issue 5, 1193-1209

Abstract: Cinema was one of the hallmarks of early-20th-century urban life in the US, and it was quickly seen as symptomatic of a ‘crisis of governmentality’ faced by a rapidly changing society. Urban reformers debated how best to regulate it, but this was not only a debate over the unprecedented agency of the moving image itself. It was also a debate over how to understand the specific relations that constituted the ‘vulnerable and impressionable’ spectators who were the special concern of social reform and which underlay the more generic categories of population in reformist discourse. Also problematized was the precise relationship between spectators, the image, and the conditions of exhibition. While the problematization of cinema has largely been seen as a national phenomenon, in fact it had a geography that varied by scale and location and was constituted through local differences in population and governmental strategies.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a42165 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:42:y:2010:i:5:p:1193-1209

DOI: 10.1068/a42165

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().