Between the 1920s and the 1960s, American mainstream cinematic architecture underwent a seismic shift. From the massive movie palace to the intimate streamlined theater, movie theaters became neutralized spaces for calibrated, immersive watching. Leading this charge was New York architectBenjamin Schlanger, a fiery polemicist whose designs and essays reshaped how movies were watched. This book is the first to closely examine the impact of Schlanger's work in the context of changing patterns of spectatorship; his theatres and writing suggest that the essence of film viewing lies notonly in the text, but in the spaces where movies are shown. As such, this study insists that our changing models of cinephilia are determined by physical structure: from the decorations of the palace to the black box of the contemporary auditorium, variations in movie theater design are icons forhow twentieth-century viewing has similarly transformed. In The Optical Vacuum, exhibition practice takes its rightful place as a force that propels spectatorship through time. Ultimately, space and viewing are revealed to be intertwined and co-constitutive phenomena through which spectatorship'sdiscourses are all the more clearly seen.