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ABSTRACT: In-flight cinema emerged in the 1960s against a tumultuous backdrop of technological changes in the moviegoing experience: the drive-in, the multiplex, experiments in 3D, and the broadcast of films on television. In this article, I argue that the decision by airlines to provide headphone sets to passengers in order to access the sound track has important implications for the study of spectatorship and exhibition. This new practice-a group of spectators listening to film sound tracks through headphones- heralded the advent of the separated spectator, a crucial figure in the current digital era of cinema.
KEYWORDS: headphones, spectatorship, sound studies, travel, in-flight entertainment, captivity
In her essay on the "End of Cinema," Anne Friedberg argued that prior to the advent of digitalization, three technologies introduced in the 1970s and 1980s- the VCR, the remote control, and cable television-contributed to a destabilization of a singular cinema.1 To this list of technologies, I would add another that predates them all: headphones. As Friedberg detailed, within the cultural imaginary, the VCR, remote, and cable television empower individual choice and agency by allowing limited viewer control over the viewed material. Headphones are also associated with personalization and social atomization since they allow their user to filter out certain sounds and listen only to the selected audio channel, making private spaces in public places.2 To claim that headphones have anything to do with cinema may seem startling; like the technologies Friedberg examines, headphones do not normally play a role in film history, nor are they associated with the cinematic experience. However, since the 1960s, headphones have been a crucial part of watching films in one rarified venue-the airplane-that prefigures the way they are employed now in an era of digital cinema and personalized individual viewing.
Contrary to what many assume about in-flight cinema, airlines had to be convinced that showing films in airplanes was a worthwhile venture. David Flexer, who owned a chain of movie theaters in Memphis, took his idea of in-flight cinema to several airlines between 1958 and 1960. Only TWA, then a minor player in international air travel, agreed to fund his experiment. Some airlines were skeptical of its technical feasibility and cost, while others feared that passengers would be angered at being forced to watch...