The Royal Photographic Society

Abstract In the 1940s and 50s, Weegee shot a considerable number of photographs in New York City's movie theaters. These photos contribute important insights on the history of cinema spectatorship in the form of visual arguments about the movie audience. This article places the images in dialogue with theories and histories of the disembodied spectator. It discusses the photographer's particular fascination with sleeping moviegoers. The sleepy filmgoer embodies simultaneously the model and counter-model of spectatorial attention. This figure focalizes a strand of theory that associates filmic reception with scattered, dispersive forms of attention that stray from aesthetic or disciplinary norms of absorption.

The traveling exhibition Film und Foto, inaugurated in 1929 by the famous German Werkbund association, stands as a critical landmark in the exhibition of modernist photography and film. Yet walking through its inaugural venue, in Stuttgart, was as much like flipping through an instructional photo essay as navigating an exhibition space. The first of the show's thirteen rooms, for example, offered a large number of prints that recapitulated the history of photography, or more specifically the history of its practical use. Displayed on sleek scaffolds that efficiently expanded the available exhibition surface, these prints hung in what may best be described as modernist salon style meets the printed page. A lower register seems strung near thigh level while a second row pushed toward the ceiling. The left-page/right-page and vertical/horizontal dialogues this arrangement afforded encouraged viewers to compare photographs taken from the spheres of science and industry to avant-garde prints inspired by the former. Above this series of exchanges ran a prominent sans-serif caption, a punning query that framed the entire show: “Where is photography's development headed?”

Shortly after the news broke this winter that President Thabo Mbeki had doubts about the link between HIV and AIDS, Malegapuru William Makgoba, the first black president of South Africa's Medical Research Council, launched a high-profile, frontal assault, including sharply worded editorials in leading South African newspapers and in Science. It's not a particularly comfortable position for a man who shares many of Mbeki's political views.

In December 1996, Omu Anzala returned to Kenya after completing his Ph.D. work in Canada on HIV's interactions with the immune system to work with a collaborative AIDS research project started by researchers from his university and the University of Manitoba. Now the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative has funded Anzala and his collaborators to fashion an AIDS vaccine based on a strain of HIV circulating in Kenya.

Efforts have recently heated up in several African countries to tailor-make preparations that many believe offer the best hope yet for stopping HIV cold. But all are at the earliest stages, which means it will take years before a vaccine might prove its worth.

(1984). Movement, color and sound in a ‘Darke Roome’. Quarterly Review of Film Studies: Vol. 9, Archaeology of Cinema, pp. 33-39.