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June 2, 2007
The Public Living Room Experience
Via Jim Emerson's Scanners blog, Christopher Hawthorne's architectural review of the new 12-screen flagship Landmark Theatre at the Westside Pavilion. The theater is clearly designed to compete with LA's other art houses, including the ArcLight and the Bridge, but as Hawthorne observes, what is significant about the new Landmark is its desire to reproduce the home theater experience:
But it is also designed to compete directly with your living room--with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to "The Daily Show."Of course, it's easy to point out that the Landmark has targeted a very specific niche audience (or taste culture) with this new architectural design, which Hawthorne, perhaps correctly, reads as "congratulating" that small segment of the population.As if to acknowledge how tough it's becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three "Living Room" theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset.
Like Hawthorne, I'm intrigued by what these "Living Room" theaters say about attitudes towards moviegoing in a digital era, but I'm curious about how the use of couches and overstuffed loveseats will work out. As Emerson points out, many of the screening rooms only accommodate 30-50 people, making it reasonable to ask whether they will generate enough revenue to be profitable, but perhaps the bigger question, at least for me, is how these screening rooms will negotiate the boundaries between public and private represented by bringing a certain version of the domestic screening experience into the more public space of the movie theater (keeping in mind that theaters have always only been "semipublic spaces" as Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues in Recreational Terror). Given that moviegoing is often a solitary act for me, I'm wondering how couches and loveseats--rather than individual seats--will shape how strangers share this semipublic space (if at all). Ideally, it could contribute to the public film cultures discussed by Barbara Klinger in Beyond the Multiplex. At the very least, I'm fascinated by the desire to re-create the home theater system at the movie theater and the continued characterization of the 1980s-era multiplex as the bad object against which contemporary screening experiences, whether at home or in the art house, are defined.
Update: Here's a second LA Times article on the new art house theater at Westside Pavilion. Not sure it adds much to what I've already written, but the discussion of movie theaters and public space or movie theaters and their relationship to the local community is interesting. It also gives me a chance to complain about Landmark's annoying decision to refer to themselves as Landmark Theatres rather than using the standard American spelling of "theater."
Posted by chuck at June 2, 2007 2:32 PM
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