No One Likes to Be a Captive Audience: Headphones and

In-Flight Cinema

Stephen Groening

Film History: An International Journal, Volume 28, Number 3, 2016, pp. 114-138
(Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/640056

Access provided by The University of Groningen (12 Sep 2017 17:24 GMT)
STEPHEN GROENING

No One Likes to Be a Captive Audience:

Headphones and In-Flight Cinema

ABSTRACT: In-flight cinema emerged in the 1960s against a tumultuous backdrop of

technological changes in the moviegoing experience: the drive-in, the multiplex, experi-
ments in 3D, and the broadcast of films on television. In this article, I argue that the deci-
sion 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 prac-
ticea 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 televisioncontributed to a destabili-
zation 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. Head-
phones 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 head-
phones have anything to do with cinema may seem startling; like the tech-
nologies 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
venuethe airplanethat prefigures the way they are employed now in an era
of digital cinema and personalized individual viewing.

Film History, 28.3, pp. 114138. Copyright 2016 Trustees of Indiana University. doi: 10.2979/filmhistory.28.3.06
 115

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 a film, where pre-
viously they could read, converse, and/or sleep. Flexer responded to objections
that passengers would be subjected to an experience they did not desire, since
they could not physically leave the airborne theater, by declaring, passen-
gers would not be a captive audience, because the sound was transmitted only
through the headsets.3 However, after the introduction of in-flight cinema
in 1961, complaints about the imposition of films on what otherwise might
be a pleasurable journey proliferated.4 Unlike how frequent travelers think of
in-flight entertainment nowas a distraction that makes the cramped condi-
tions of the cabin barely tolerableduring the 1960s and 1970s, in-flight films
were not exclusively thought of as escapist; on the contrary, a vocal portion
of passengers considered film exhibition an imprisoning activity.5 In order to
understand why passengers would complain about having to watch a film in
flight, it is necessary to describe the early technological apparatus of in-flight
cinema.
Because of new seating arrangements instituted in 1958 with the intro-
duction of economy class and jet aircraft, all passenger seats faced the same
direction in parallel rows, an arrangement that, along with the large screen,
Gabriele Pedull has argued, was the true core of twentieth-century cinema,
far more than directors styles, generic conventions, or national schools.6 In this
sense, the airplane cabin from 1958 on was already theatrical. When TWA began
showing 16mm films in the first-class cabin of flights between New York City
and destinations in Europe in the summer of 1961, little had to be changed: only
hanging a screen and installing a projector were necessary to produce the classi-
cal arrangement of theatrical exhibition. Indeed, the system designed by Flexers
company InFlight Motion Pictures consisted mainly of a ceiling-mounted 16mm
projector and a large screen hung at the front of the cabin. While the system used
a daylight screen and InFlight Motion Pictures claimed that window shades
could stay open during projection, common practice was to close the shades so
that the image could be seen more clearly, cutting passengers off from the view
out the window. The sound was sent via wire to the armrest of every seat, and
passengers used stethoscope-style headsets to listen to the films sound track.
Flight attendants would distribute sterilized headsets in sealed plastic bags

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and collect them after each flight, so that the foam ends could be removed,
discarded, and replaced.7
The practice of passing out headphones so passengers can enjoy in-flight
cinema seems to confirm Michel Chions assertion that sound is an added value
to cinema that makes the image meaningful.8 In contrast to Chion, Flexers
assertion that passengers are not a captive audience depends on the proposition
that listening causes looking, so that the image is the added value. According
to this logic, the image alone can be ignored, but filling the air with the sounds
of the sound track would make passengers captive to the film. If the image
was indeed primary, as in much of classical film theory, then passengers would
become captivated by the screen without the aid of headphones. Disingenuous
or not, Flexers suggestion points to the way that human senses, bodily position,
attention, and subjectivity could all be divided and fragmented even in the face
of a presumed overwhelming technological apparatus. Headphones enable this
fragmentation by allowing users to listen to one media source while looking at
another. This separation of sound from image runs counter to the ideal viewing
situation in which the large image and synchronized sound overwhelm and
envelop the spectator.
In January 1961, when New York Times reporter Paul Friedlander was
invited to partake in a special press screening onboard a TWA 707 flying over
the Atlantic, he echoed Flexers logic that listening causes looking, writing:
The best word about the aerial movie is that the audience, although physi-
cally captive in the fuselage, is not a captive of the movie. The film is projected
onto the screen but, if you do not want to look at it, no one can force you. The
sound is piped to each passenger through a miniature headphone set that is
plugged into jacks beside each seat.9 That Friedlander points to the separation
of sound from image as proof positive that in-flight cinema was not coercive is
telling. Friedlanders comments indicated a double form of captivity: physical
captivity in the airplane and a kind of aesthetic or sensory captivity within the
film. For Friedlander and in-flight cinemas promoters, because one type of
captivitywithin the airplanewas presumably freely chosen via the purchase
of a ticket, the second type of captivitywithin the filmshould be achieved
through similar logic, that is, freely chosen by the passenger. The dilemma of
the captive audience was thus resolved through headphones. Headphones were
positioned as a liberating technology: passengers could escape into the film
through headphones, and, conversely, passengers could escape from the film
by not using headphones.
As a consequence of this technological system, in-flight cinema has been
a form of exhibition that separated sound from image technologically and con-
tinues to make the matching of sound track to image contingent on audience

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action. In so doing, this particularity of in-flight cinema calls attention to the

opposition between the ocular-centric term spectator and the ontological term
audience, further problematizing the more traditional distinction in film stud-
ies between spectator as the term indicating an ideal or imagined person in front
of the screen and audience as the historical, or anthropological, actually existing
group of people in front of the screen.10 For in-flight cinema, headphones were
an aid to help the passenger gain entry into the filmic world and, perhaps, leave
behind the physical confines of the airplane cabin. Escaping the captivity of
the airplane meant becoming captivated by the film, a form of immersion and
absorption facilitated by what Karin Bjisterveld has called acoustic cocoon-
ing, whereby passengers could wrap themselves in technological layers of sen-
sory protection from the otherwise boring, monotonous, and yet acoustically
overstimulating environment of the airplane cabin.11
Indeed, the acoustic overstimulation of engine noise has historically
been a major obstacle to in-flight movie exhibition. In the 1920s, some airlines
experimented with showing silent films, that is, films without a synchronized
sound track, but the films shown by TWA and other airlines post-1961 were not
silent in any sense of the term. Airlines therefore had to contend with engine
noise conflicting with the sound track of the film. Even though these airlines
had a public address system of speakers used for crucial and urgent in-flight
announcements, the chosen method for overcoming the ambient noise within
the jet airplane cabin has been the use of headphones. This suggests that head-
phones were adopted because airlines thought passengers had to be protected
from the sound track of the film. Headphones keep sound in, capturing it within
headspace, so that listening can be confined to those passengers who opt in.
Making headphones necessary to access the sound track allowed airlines to
position in-flight cinema in terms of independence and autonomous choice. But
this logic of choice still rested on an argument that sound, not image, makes
film inescapable. To amend Friedlanders words, it is as if airlines declared of
cinema, if you dont want to look at it, dont listen.
That the use of headphones for in-flight cinema was positioned within
debates regarding captivity also calls attention to the way that spectatorship
has been implicated in larger sociocultural debates over individual choice and
agency within a group. The issue of captivity within the airplane has not been
resolved (as recent incidents of so-called air rage indicate), but in-flight cinema
pointed the way toward contemporary methods of addressing this dilemma:
the creation of a personal media bubble using individualized technologies such
as headphones and a small liquid crystal display to produce separation from
others physically copresent and filter out unwanted sensory stimulations.12 The
emergence of the separated spectator, that figure which now looms over the

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new digital era of cinema culture, has its origins in in-flight cinema. In order to
successfully institute airborne exhibition of films to a diverse group of people
within a physical space they could not leave, airlines had to devise a technologi-
cal apparatus that allowed for film exhibition as well as a host of other activities.
The choice of an auditory environment that might include silence, music, or even
conversation is made possible through the use of headphones, and, as we shall
see, this mixture of silence and sound also encourages the practice of talking
for the film.13 Additionally, headphones are able to address the diversity of lin-
guistic backgrounds within the airplane cabin, enabling the simultaneous play-
back of multiple sound tracks in different languages synced to a single film. The
use of headphones thus allowed airlines to produce a spectatorship separated by
spoken language, but not by image, calling into question the stability of the text
of the film itself. The flip of a switch or turn of a dial can transform a domestic
film into a foreign-language film (and vice versa), imbuing the cinematic expe-
rience with a sense of exoticism. In this scenario, the sound track allows the
confined passenger to travel, encouraging a type of movement between cultural
milieus, even as the passenger never leaves the seat in the cabin. As I have argued
elsewhere, in-flight entertainment encourages distraction and diversion from
the monotony and physical discomfort of commercial jet travel, in part by offer-
ing an aspirational cosmopolitanism through the film and music selections
offered to passengers.14 By granting each passenger individualized access to the
sound track of the film through technological enclosure, headphones are both
a harbinger of the current digital media age and, conversely, the fulfillment
of silent films promise of a universal language by making access to language
universal rather than creating a language understood universally.
Implicit in these observations is the conviction that the study of the mun-
dane objects that enable film culture are crucial to understanding the history of
film and its contexts. As objects, headphones foreclose certain types of engage-
ment with cinema even as they open new possibilities. Further, these objects
became the commodity purchased by passengers within the airplane cabin for
access to the in-flight film, a peculiarity of in-flight exhibition that resulted from
international negotiations between airlines (as discussed below). Moreover, my
argument that these mundane objects have manifold consequences for film
history and cinema culture arises from an underlying position that studying
exhibition history is key to understanding changes in cinema culture. Over and
above changes in style, narrative, and form, exhibition has been the site in which
debates over what constitutes cinema were staged. Changes in ideas regarding
ideal and/or proper spectatorship (not to mention actual audience experience)
are realized in the space between projector and screen as much as within the
space of the screen itself.

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The history of in-flight cinema illuminates a path toward thinking

through the new media of personalized cinema: the technologies and practices
that have underwritten the transition of moviegoing and spectatorship from a
group event to a personal practice. Like in-flight cinema, these new devices of
personalized viewing appeal through real and imagined types of mobility, both
physical and cultural. Such an argument is also a reading of history, in which
what were once marginal practices later become widespread practices. These
marginal practices were not ever fully new; to paraphrase Raymond Williams,
they emerged from residual and dominant practices.15 Headphone use dates
back to the 1920s and earlier for telephone operators, airplane pilots, and radio
enthusiasts. Selecting an audio channel while on the move had its precedent
in the transistor radio, introduced in 1954. Additionally, in-flight cinema was
introduced alongside changes in those spaces of theatrical exhibition on the
ground: the drive-in was at its peak in the late 1950s and the multiplex theater
had just been introduced in 1960. As with television, these midcentury exhibi-
tion practices were not noted for ideal spectatorial conditions.16 At the same
time, in-flight cinema was aligned to dominant modes of theatrical exhibition
in that groups of strangers faced the same large screen in a darkened space,
and between 1961 and the early 1970s, airlines used portable 16mm projectors
(rather than magnetic tape cassettes later associated with the VCR). In-flight
cinema took up this panoply of residual, dominant, and emergent modes to pro-
duce a hybrid of radio, television, and film. This history demonstrates how spec-
tatorship is contingent upon and negotiated with practices outside of the strictly
cinematic. Some of theseradio, television, air travelmight not be considered
part of film history, while othersthe drive-in, the multiplex, 16mmoccupy
the margins of film history, even as they reshape our understanding of the field.
HEADPHONES, THE COMMODITY OF IN-FLIGHT CINEMA
In-flight cinema emerged alongside a host of other changes in the airline indus-
try, including the 1958 introduction of transatlantic jet flights. Jet travel prom-
ised to make transoceanic and transcontinental travel more accessible to a
larger group of consumers since it was faster, cheaper, and generally smoother
than the propeller-based flights prior to 1958. Another change, economy class,
was an acknowledgment of the potential for jet airplanes to turn air travel into
mass transit. Economy class instituted a new type of air travel with greater
seat density, which meant smaller seats and the elimination of seats facing
each other that had existed in earlier iterations of propeller-driven airplanes,
such as the Boeing Stratocruiser.17 This new fare class was adopted by members
of the International Air Transportation Association (IATA), the transnational
trade organization that negotiated and determined routes, landing rights, and

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fares.18 In 1961, three major players in the IATAAir France, British Overseas
Airways Corporation, and Pan American Airlinesclaimed the introduction of
in-flight cinema on TWAs transatlantic flights violated the fare class and rate
agreements, arguing that in-flight cinema should be considered an additional
service outside of what was covered in the fare classifications. In the period
leading up to the IATAs 1964 meeting in Athens, these airlines pressured the
association against in-flight movies, claiming TWAs practice constituted unfair
competition. Fearful of losing his business, InFlight Motion Picture president
David Flexer countered by claiming that in-flight cinema was integral to filling
the new transatlantic jets with passengers, many of whom might be new to
flying and presumed to be nervous about the prospect of jet travel.19 Despite
Flexers efforts, by 1965, TWA acquiesced to the IATA members who voted to ban
in-flight cinema. However, the US Civil Aeronautics Board refused to approve
the ban after receiving a brief from the US Justice Department arguing that
banning in-flight cinema constituted unfair trade practice because it prohibited
the motion-picture industry from exhibiting and distributing its product. Still
exhibiting films during the ongoing negotiations, TWA and InFlight Motion
Pictures revealed that the cost to airlines for in-flight cinema came to less than
a dollar per passenger. Armed with this data, the IATA struck a compromise:
airlines would charge passengers $2.50 for the use of headphones to listen to
the film sound track, making in-flight cinema an additional service passengers
paid for separately from airfare and literalizing Chions observation that sound
is an added value to the image. For the next few decades, airline passengers in
economy class would hand over a few dollars in order to rent headphones for the
express purpose of accessing the sound track for the film.20 Many passengers
understood (or deliberately misunderstood) this financial transaction as the
purchase price for a headphone set, not as a fee for the film, since the film was
shown on the large screen whether any given passenger purchased headphones
or not. TWA claimed passengers stole about 50,000 headsets in 1963 and in
response charged their flight attendants with policing passengers headphone
use and demanding their return.21
That passengers were asked to rent headphones suggests a different way
of understanding the political economy of moviegoing, from a public event in
a specialized space to a private activity in a hybrid space alongside ongoing
noncinematic activities. While the financial transaction for the movie theater
audience is relatively straightforward (purchasing a ticket for access to the
auditorium and the projection of the film with accompanying sound track), for
the in-flight cinema audience, at least from 1965 until 1988, when the seatback
screen was introduced, transactions were more complex. Passengers purchased
an airplane ticket for access to the airplane cabin, which strictly speaking was

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not equivalent to the movie theater auditorium, since the film could not be
heard without headphones. A film chosen by the airline, sometimes without
advance notice to passengers, would be projected on a screen at a time chosen
by the flight crew, and that film might get interrupted several times by the
crew, while projection of the film might even halt before the film concluded.
Moreover, in order to access the sound track, passengers must have obtained
a separate technological device. In practice, therefore, passengers did not pay
$2.50 for a film, which was projected onto the large screen; all passengers on the
plane were de facto viewers, even if they were not auditors (or, put another way,
they were spectators even if they were not part of the audience). This complex
of financial transactions indicates how, already in the 1960s, the fragmentary
nature of spectatorship and moviegoing vis--vis a separation of the senses was
institutionally acknowledged, even if it was only in a relatively marginal practice
of cinematic exhibition.22
THE ACOUSTIC SPACES OF HEADPHONES
The rhetoric of captivity alluded to in the opening of this article indicates the
airlines had to assure passengers that the sound track was escapable. In order
to mitigate potential passenger outrage that the time passengers had previously
thought could be spent in myriad ways (sleeping, conversing, playing cards,
reading) would be overtaken by the exhibition of a film, airlines explicitly men-
tioned headphones on their press releases and promotional material, a gesture
taken up in press reports as well.23 This tacticusing headphones to argue
against the imagined captive audiencerelied on passengers knowledge of
headphones as a personal and privatizing audio technology. Listening through
headphones while surrounded by others was not a new practice since the por-
table transistor radio had been introduced years earlier in 1954, and Sonys
1958 TR 610 model, small enough to fit in a mans shirt pocket, was sold with
an earphone (for private listening).24 As Keir Keightley has recounted, the
postwar period also saw the rise of headphone use by audiophiles and enthu-
siasts of the new hi-fi stereo systems.25 Nevertheless, early 1960s newspaper
accounts of in-flight cinema took pains to explain the headphone technology
and assure travelers that they were not obliged to listen to the films sound
track. Paul Friedlanders aforementioned 1961 article described the headphone
set as a toy stethoscope and went on to detail the volume control knob, while
Robert Serlings 1963 explanation of TWAs Strato-Cinema system read: The
projectors will be installed in the forward part of the coach section, along with
the sterilized earsets that are plugged into outlets at each seat. This enables
passengers to hear the dialog without disturbing those who dont want to watch
or listen. Flight Internationals 1964 review included this explanation: We

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found the earpieces, with their individual foam rubber pads (discarded after
every use) quite unobtrusive for the first hour, though they began to get a little
uncomfortable during the last half hour. Each seat has an individual plug and
volume control and there is a millisecond time lag between the earpieces (it says
here again) to create a surround sense of stereophony.26
On the one hand, the novelty of headphone use to access the film sound
track is evidenced by the mere fact that these and other news accounts felt
compelled to comment on the headphones even as they reinforced the mes-
sage that not using the headphones is tantamount to not watching the film. In
addition to the emphasis that individual passengers controlled the level and
source of sound and that the headphones were hygienic, the Flight International
review calls attention to the split between image and sound, and the way that
headphone technology reproduces sound for the listener to create an illusion of
sound inside an individual passengers head, rather than in the shared collective
space of the cabin/theater.
That headphones produce new sonic spaces has been a long-standing
theme in histories of the technology. Jonathan Sterne begins his history of
headphones with the binaural stethoscope of the physician, which importantly
provided access to the sonic space of the interior of the patients body. But
because the stethoscope provided sounds only to the physician, Sterne used
the stethoscope in the service of an argument regarding private listening.27
Charles Stankievech responded by contending that the stethoscopes real cul-
tural impact was not necessarily the revelation of the patients corporeal interior
as much as it was the construction of new sonic space, created within the mass
of the body where sound masses float in an impossible space, the head space
of the doctor (emphasis in original).28 Following this logic, and more germane
to my argument here, Stankievech observed that headphones create imagi-
nary spaces within another imaginary space.29 In other words, listening to a
film sound track with headphones allows for the establishment of the diegetic
soundspace of the film within the headspace of the passenger. If screening
films in airplane cabins was meant to allow passengers to partially forget their
bodily presence in the fuselage and enter the diegetic world of the film, then
the headphones generated an escape pod even from that: into the headspace
of the spectator. Therefore, with headphones, even the personal and embodied
spatial relationship between sound and image space disrupts what was once
thought to be the ideal relationship between the space of the theater and the
films diegetic space.
The stethoscope-style headphones used by airlines did more than just
destabilize the spectatorial relations presumed endemic to cinema: airlines also
presented the stethoscope-style headphones as fashion objects. Heike Webers

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Fig. 1: Pan American Airlines advertise-

ment, 1965 (Courtesy Special Collections,
University of Miami Libraries)

history of headphones shows that the monaural in-ear buds of the type that
came with the pocket transistor radio were associated with aging and dis-
ability because they resembled a hearing aid, while the stethoscope-style sets
were considered more stylish. Importantly, the stethoscope model did not go
over the head, and so did not interfere with womens hairstyles.30 Additionally,
it could be read as a status marker in that the stethoscope presents success
and intellectualism through its association with that emblem of middle-class
establishment, the medical doctor. The stethoscope-style headset did not sig-
nal the antisocial attitude of an audiophile, who used a closed headphone
design with isolating earcups to listen to the hi-fi stereo; rather, the stetho-
scope-style headset signaled openness, since the head was not covered (in fact,
barely touched).31 Advertising for in-flight cinema glamorized stethoscope-style
headsets, positioning them as objects of sophistication, style, and modernity. A
1965 advertisement for Pan Ams Theatre-in-the-Air shows two heterosexual
couples laughing and pointing at a screen (out of frame) while wearing the
stethoscope style headphones; smartly dressed, white, and clearly upper middle
class, the man in the foreground wears heavy-rimmed glasses while his female
companion puts her left hand on his right shoulder, displaying her wedding ring
(fig. 1). The couple behind them sits similarly closely together, both also involved
in the screen. This Pan Am advertisement is in line with this representation
of headphones: no special attention is given to the headphones in use; rather,
they become stylish and modern by association with other stylish and modern

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objects and people in the advertisement. Here, as in most newspaper advertise-

ments for in-flight cinema in the 1960s, the emphasis is on enjoyment, pleasure,
and fun while the focus is on the facial expression of the passengers and the
potential to bring about sociality during air travel despite the novel technology
of in-flight film exhibition and the resulting problem of engine noise. Indeed,
the advertisement attempts to overcome the separation brought about by head-
phones by portraying the members of each heterosexual couple as physically
interacting with each other and physically reacting to what appears on screen
and what they hear through the headphones.32
The headphones of in-flight cinema were instruments of negotiated pri-
vacy, much like headphones in use in contemporary public settings. Head-
phones in the airplane cabin signaled cinematic immersion to other passengers
and discouraged conversation. The social potentials of a shared common screen
were thus stymied by the isolating individualism of headphone use. But, fol-
lowing Webers analysis, it would be a mistake to consider headphones only as
a technology of withdrawal and exclusion, since they could allow for particular
kinds of social interaction. For headphones users, the effect of shutting out
other passengers, the flight crew, and engine noise assists in concentration on
the screen itself and the diegetic world of the film. Headphones are therefore
not simply enclosing, they are also anticlaustrophobic; that is, even though they
cocoon and shield, they allow users to lose themselves in a mental headspace
taking them out of their current predicament. Air travel can feel like captiv-
itystrapped in a chair for four to six hours, with little chance to adjust body
position, much less stand up and walk aroundand distractions or pastimes in
such a situation are welcome. Headphones, by excluding the sensory input that
reminds passengers of the fact of flight, better allow for the willful forgetting of
the physical body needed for the classical mode of spectatorship and introduce
a new form of separated spectatorship.33
HEADPHONES AND SPOKEN-LANGUAGE SOUND TRACKS
In the synchronized sound era, the challenge for filmmakers has been to make
objects speak or, more precisely, to present potential sources for sounds within
the frame. The urge for sounds and image to match and be completely congruent
has arisen from the insistence that sound temporally match objects presented
on the screen and for the image to present the spectator with plausible sources
for such sounds. Historically, the guarantor of this fidelity between image and
sound has been spoken language. As Rick Altman reminded us, despite earlier
films possessing synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer has been acknowledged
as the first sound film [...] because it was the first to bring synchronized dia-
logue, i.e. language, to film, suggesting that spoken language marks the real

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break between the so-called sound and silent eras.34 Altman went on to argue
that moving lips [...] anchor the sound on the image and appear to be pro-
ducing the sounds we hear, allowing the cinema to constitute its own unity.35
Similarly, Mary Ann Doane has suggested that synchronized sound restored
a corporeal unity of body and voice and satisfied a desire for life-like repre-
sentation and presence.36 For Doane, film sound that denied this corporeal
unity risked exposing the material heterogeneity of the cinema.37 The aim
of synchronized sound is to disguise what actually occurs in production, the
technological separation of sound recording from image capturing on set, and
in postproduction, the process of automated dialogue replacement.
The use of headphones for in-flight cinema, on the other hand, calls
attention to corporeal heterogeneity through the production of headspace and
the material heterogeneity of the cinema. The act of plugging in the head-
set reminds passengers of the separation of sound track from image. Within
in-flight cinema, the image does not speak but can only be ventriloquized by the
passenger, making the passenger an active creator within the cinematic appa-
ratus. The contingency of sound and image is further elaborated if selecting the
wrong audio channelhearing Bobby Darin while Inherit the Wind (1960) plays
on the screen, for instanceor selecting the channel with the films dialogue in
a language not understood by the passenger. For the passenger viewing the film,
selecting an alternate language track puts sound and image out of sync, even in
cases where they were meant for each other.
Another way of looking at this phenomenon is to argue that if spoken
language is the guarantor of unity in sound and image, then the insistence on
this unity gave rise to a cinema predominated by spoken language rather than
a language of images, the ascendance of national cinemas, and the attendant
necessity of enforcing modern realism (life-like representation) through sonic
technologies. The advent of synchronized sound meant that if films were to
travel, different versions had to be produced for each linguistic region (although
the practice of showing different versions of films prior to the widespread adop-
tion of synchronized sound was certainly not uncommon). Thus, the unity of
body and voice and of image and sound produced a language barrier between
moviegoers. In order to address this barrier, Hollywood studios set up shop at
Joinville, in northeastern France, to reproduce multiple language versions of
their films: different sets of actors would perform (or reenact) the same film in
five different languages. This practice relied on a sense that stories and narra-
tives could travel, while the lack of synchronization between the performers lips
and sounds could not. In the words of Nataa Durovicov, the Joinville produc-
tions represent one attempt to construct a synthetic transnational diegesis.38
According to Douglas Gomery, these versions proved to be cost prohibitive as a

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way to solve the translation problem that emerged as a result of synchronized

spoken language.39 After the 1930s, American and European film industries
increasingly turned to dubbing as a way to export films to audiences whose pri-
mary language was different than the production language of the film. Dubbing,
however, produces disjunctures and gaps between lip movements and sound,
something that risks revealing the material heterogeneity of the cinema and
potentially destabilizes the diegesis.40 Out-of-sync spoken language seems to
have been a larger issue in the United States than in Europe, to the point that
dubbing of non-English films is often considered improper by cinephiles, even
when those films had been dubbed in production.41 This may very well stem from
a tradition set in the 1950s by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
(AMPAS), which, in creating the criteria for the foreign-language film category,
required a film to be shown commercially in theaters in the United States with
a non-English sound track. For AMPAS, foreign films do not look foreign, they
sound foreign. AMPAS guidelines presumed that the image would be legible and
comprehensible regardless of origin, while the sound track is a potential barrier
that prevents the spectator from grasping the film. From this perspective, for-
eignness and national identity are located in the sound track, rather than the
visual style or content of the image.42 Mark Betz has proposed that this may be
a distinctly American viewpoint, given that postwar European coproductions
regularly involved multilanguage dubbing and that, for the category known in
the United States as European art film, the notion of an original sound track is
largely a fantasy.43
Spoken language has been a particular issue for in-flight cinema since
it has been a transnational practice aimed at what David Flexer called trans-
ocean and transcontinental commuters.44 In contrast to Betzs argument that
resistance to dubbing is largely an American phenomenon, Aviation Daily spec-
ulated that the actual reason European transatlantic carriers were reluctant
to provide in-flight films was not because of the financial outlay but because
of the problem of language: One major reason why most European airlines
oppose in-flight movies is the almost unsolvable problem of what films and
what language to use. If Alitalia or Air France show US movies in English, they
are bound to get brickbats from home base. If they show their own in their own
dialects, they fear reaction from US passengers whom they woo for transatlantic
passage.45
According to the major English-language publication for the aviation
industry, in-flight cinema presented European carriers with a dilemma. They
sought to attract US passengers for transatlantic flights and were well aware
that US moviegoers were not enthusiastic about dubbed foreign-language films.
Travelers from Europe may have been loyal to their national airlines, but there

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was still greater potential for a multilingual audience in the cabin of a European
carrier than a US one. If films were shown inside these cabins, multilingual
sound tracks had to be available, which require multiple audio channels, and
multiple sound tracks means airlines effectively show different film versions to
different sets of passengers within the same airplane.
Between 1961 and 1963, TWA exhibited only one film originally produced
in a language other than English, Stowaway in the Sky (1962), which was Jack
Lemmons dubbed version of Albert Lamorisses childrens film Le Voyage en
Ballon (1960). Shown on flights in August and September 1962, the airline was
likely interested in the film not so much as a follow-up to the international
sensation of Red Balloon (1956) but because it resembled the format of an air-
borne travelogue over France.46 Although the 1960s marked a period in which
foreign-language films became associated with art cinema, high culture, and
elite tastes, based on available records, it appears that TWA, American, and Pan
Am exhibited Hollywood productions with only English-language sound tracks
available.47 While Pan Ams 1964 inaugural booklet for its Theatre-in-the-Air
service included audio channel selection menus in English, French, and Ger-
man, there was only one channel dedicated to the film sound track.48 Pan Ams
1965 press release regarding the exhibition of films on California-to-Hawaii
flights, while noting that the system came with individual controls for volume
and channel selection, declared the audio program offers a large selection of
musical features for passengers who do not speak English. Program notes will
be printed in English, Chinese and Japanese, implying that the film sound track
was just in English.49 It was only beginning with Air Frances 1966 contract with
InFlight Motion Pictures to exhibit French and American films with French and
English sound-track channels that an airline offered multiple language sound
tracks for films.50
Not until the 1970 introduction of the 747 by Pan Am and Boeing did US
airlines begin regularly offering foreign-language films. Because Pan Am was
primarily an international carrier (at the time, its only domestic route was
between California and Hawaii), it catered to an international population, and
multiple film sound tracks were needed for Pan Ams passengers. Pan Am con-
tracted Instrument Systems Corporation (ISC) to provide the in-flight cinema
wiring for its 747s. In its correspondence with Pan Am, ISC asserted that because
its equipment could transmit multiple film sound tracks synced with the film,
it breaks the language barrier and solves some of the problems encountered
by the multilingual makeup of the passenger list.51 Because the 747 became
widely adopted by airlines for transoceanic travel, the sound system pioneered
by ISC meant that in-flight cinema on international flights from the 1970s to
the 1990s often consisted of a common image for all passengers but separate

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sound tracks organized by languages chosen by each passenger. In essence, the

passenger could renationalize the film in question with the flick of a switch or
turning of a dial in order to access overdubbed dialogue. Airlines controlled
their projection of national identity through decor, livery, the characteristics
of the flight crew, and nomenclature (Air France, Japan Air, Ethiopian Airlines,
etc.), while in-flight cinema provided an opportunity for passengers to produce
new versions of the exhibited films that corresponded to their own national
culture. This procedure is predicated on the same logic used by AMPAS, in which
images and narratives are presumed to be universal, while spoken language
separates audiences according to linguistic background. As Durovicov has
argued, national cinema was predicated on the congruence of the diegesis, the
acoustic space of the movie theatre, and the designated national space outside
it.52 But since, as previously argued, headphones limit the acoustic space of the
movie theatre to each passengers head, the films diegesis need only align with
the native tongue of a single passenger. Thus, headphone technology allowed
for a panoply of national cinemas within the cabin, acoustically apportioning
boundaries between passengers.
Listening to a film sound track while gazing at the screen is not the only
way to encounter a film. Many passengers declined to purchase headphones
and sat in front of a silent screen. Paul Hofmann, a foreign correspondent for
the New York Times, wrote a 1966 column in which he argued that the practice of
not paying for the headphones and making up dialogue for in-flight films com-
bines snobbery and thrift, since passengers could exercise their creativity by
providing snide remarks, story summaries, and imaginary dialogue. Hofmann
put this practice squarely in the liminal space between Hollywood and art
cinema: while most films explain too much, directors like Ingmar Bergman
and Federico Fellini often tell the viewer too little, even when sound is added
to their superb photography. Without the sound, you can transform a fatigued
potboiler in-flight movie into your own do-it-yourself Fellini.53 Hofmann spent
much of the column deriding the film choices on airlines; his primary example
was the Ricky Nelson vehicle Love and Kisses (1965). But Hofmanns suggestion
that passengers supply their own dialogue for a film is only viable because of
the use of headphones for in-flight cinema. As Gabriele Pedull has noted, the
introduction of synchronized sound and spoken language in the cinema ush-
ered in a new era of policing audience behavior in which audience members
would be admonished for talking during the film. In essence, the emergence of
filmic dialogue meant the disappearance of audience conversation.54 Because
such a social contract of silence in the airline cabin would be difficult, if only
because of the necessary safety instructions and announcements from the cock-
pit, headphones took on the task of producing zones of silence. Headphones

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discourage dialogue and talking by making listening to any sound source beside
the headphone itself an inconvenient chore. If the 1958 rearrangement of air-
plane seats caused the cabin to resemble a movie theater and the hanging of the
film screen completed the transformation for the field of the visible, headphones
are an attempt to produce a theatrical environment sonically and an attempt
to enforce the strictures of classical spectatorship on passengers. Hofmanns
suggestions were therefore a rebellion against the transformation of travel, then
still associated with building character and a search for authenticity, into what
he framed as unsophisticated diversion. So while Hofmanns column reads like
a screed against the insipid and fatigued films exhibited on airplanes, his
suggestion to be creative and playful also constituted a critique of the protocols
of classical spectatorship.55 And it is a critique of classical spectatorship that
adhered to the rhetoric present in airline advertisements during the 1960s. Air-
lines desperately wanted to persuade passengers that air travel was liberating
and freeing despite the cramped conditions of economy class alongside the
monotony of jet travel. Introducing and advocating for passengers to talk for
the screen paralleled airlines promotional rhetoric that the airplane cabin was
a space of expression and freely chosen activities.
CAPTIVITY AND THE SEPARATED SPECTATOR
Because airlines were cognizant that passengers felt trapped, the issue of captiv-
ity and the concept of a captive audience were prevalent in their advertising and
promotional materials from the outset. When American Airlines introduced its
Astrovision system in 1964, the airline sought to position in-flight cinema as one
of many possible activities available to passengers, linking freedom and auton-
omy to headphone use through advertising copy such as: You can turn on the
music simply by switching to another channel and adjusting your headsets vol-
ume as you prefer. Your neighbor can go right on watching the movie; by simply
removing your headset, you can read, write or rest (in normal light), and never be
botheredeven while the person next to you is still watching or listening. Youre
never a captive audience with Astrovision; and Of course, you can always take
off your headset and just rest. Or workweve thought of that, too.56 The logic
of these advertisements relied on the notion that the image is not absorbing or
immersive, but rather a distraction (from sleep, from work, from listening to
music), while the sound provided via headphonesthe creation of a privatized
sonic spaceis immersive and totalizing, yet freely chosen. These advertisements
presume those who wish to view the film need to listen to the sound track, and
therefore enter the film via the headset, suggesting that the auditory defines and
delimits the cinematic. American Airlines positioned its in-flight cinema within
rhetoric of choice and abundance, emphasizing the number of audio channels

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and range of musical options as well as other activities that could take place
beside the film. In addition, these advertisements emphasized the variety of
content available through its system, and some featured small vignettes with
images of films, sports, and musicians. While these advertisements proposed that
passengers could watch all these things if they wanted to, in reality the systems
were controlled by a flight attendant in the galley area, and the screened material
was selected by the airline, so that the choices available to passengers extended
to audio channel selection or whether to use headphones.
The emphasis on choice and plenitude continued through to the 1970s. In
corporate memos regarding the potential systems for the 747, Boeing Airlines
emphasized that all in-flight entertainment systems included ten channels
of audio, stethoscope-type listening devices allow passengers not watching a
program to participate in normal conversations without disturbing the view-
ing audience, high-illumination projectors in all the new systems will insure
excellent viewing quality even under full cabin lighting.57 The company work-
ing with Pan Am on the new system, Instrument Systems Corporation (ISC),
claimed to have trimmed twenty-five miles of wires from the original design,
using digital time division multiplexing, in which packets of digital informa-
tion from two signals occupied the same channel, and each packet is assigned
a time slot within the channel.58 In order to combat the appearance of captivity,
the 747 needed an entertainment system offering a range of options individual
passengers could make without cooperation or consultation with others. Digi-
talization, a technology often associated with the ascendency of so-called new
media in the 1990s, made the complexities of such a system possible.
In an advertisement that ISC took out in Pan Ams May 1971 in-flight mag-
azine, a group of four women dressed as flight attendants surround an airplane
seat, smiling widely, while two of them grasp either side of a stethoscope-style
headphone set, holding it out toward the camera (fig. 2). The headline reads,
let us entertain you with sound that comes through with flying colors on the
747. The female flight attendants represent sound itself by standing in for the
invisible sonic. Indeed, the reference to flying colors in the copy calls attention
to this visualization of sound, since the women themselves are dressed either
in green, red, blue, or black and have different hair colors and skin tones. The
image of four smiling female flight attendants attending to a single seat also
projected a (heterosexual male) fantasy of plenitude and variety; in a sense, each
attendant was a manifestation of an audio channel (although the system had
a total of twelve audio channels). Crucially, the image is of an isolated aircraft
seat, separated from the rest of the airplane, with no others in sight, so that the
passenger could imagine himself alone in the airplane, in an exclusive envi-
ronment, surrounded only by media technology (and female flight attendants).

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Fig. 2: Instrument Systems Corporation advertisement, 1971 (Courtesy Special Collections,

University of Miami Libraries)

In the advertisement, the headphone cord is plugged into the armrest

beneath the attendant on the left. She sits so that the armrest is visible beneath
her, and she has her finger on a portion of the armrest controls, either pointing to
them or demonstrating their use. The image thus doubles as a how-to guide for

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the audio system, a short image manual for sound. ISCs advertisement empha-
sized the haptic nature of in-flight cinema while also underscoring the newfound
plenitude of choices coupled with ease of use: At your fingertips on the 747the
great sound of your Pan Am Theatre-in-the-Air! Spin the dial for 12 channels
of sound, the most extensive airborne entertainment ever offered. Press your
reading light switch. Notice the pull-to-call stewardess button and dont worry
about missing announcements while listening.59 Air travel itself became a
haptic activity as passenger control over the flight experience (although limited)
transformed the audiovisual aspect of films into tactile interactions with dials,
buttons, and headphones; the aural/oral contact with flight attendants into
the fine motor action of pulling a switch; and even the cognitive and auditory
activity of listening to music into digital interaction (here, digital refers both to
the multiplexing technology and passenger fingers). On the one hand, it makes
sense that airlines would be invested in making activities and powers available
to passengers with only the smallest of gestures since airlines want passengers
to stay seated. But for the passenger, finding comfort in the ability to perform
tasks while barely moving seems like a counterintuitive response to immobility.
Given that so many of the complaints regarding air travel, particularly in the
era of economy class, center on cramped conditions, it would seem logical that
passengers would want to get up and walk to get a new videotape or DVD for
viewing or stand up in order to turn on a light for reading. But all that would
require disturbing other passengers. As a result, partly under the aegis of con-
venience and partly as an investment in solitude and isolation, the response to
captivity has been to make do with physical immobility, so that the passenger
remains at the center of a media apparatus that performs mobility for the pas-
senger. Headphones are crucial to this process, as they isolate the passenger and
provide an acoustic environment for passengers to lose themselves in.
CONCLUSION
The post-1961 airplane cabin represents a concentration of new media prac-
tices: individualized viewing and listening, separation from those physically
copresent, a selection of diverse cultural offerings that could be selected with
the press of a button, miniaturization, and the expectation of some kind of
pervasive or ambient electronic entertainment. The introduction of the seat-
back screen in 1988 intensified separations between people. From that point
on, in-flight cinema took the form of a digital database from which passengers,
independently of each other and of the flight crew, could choose films, video
games, or television shows. With these new capabilities, in-flight entertainment
moved even closer to the end of cinema Anne Friedberg associated with the
VCR, the remote control, and cable television. Multiple language sound tracks

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(and in some cases subtitled versions) were available for feature-length films.
In-flight cinema transformed from groups of passengers watching the same
image while potentially listening to different sounds to nonsimultaneous but
physically copresent media experience. There is substantial evidence that this
was not a form of spectatorship (or air travel) that was forced on passengers by
airlines but rather arose from already present practices of privacy and seclusion,
which Raymond Williams famously called mobile privatization.60 Indeed, at
least since the 1970s, passengers have sought more forms of separation between
themselves and those other passengers perceived as undesirable, such as
smokers, children, or talkers.61 This suggests that the reaction to captivity is to
increase the number of cells, if the prison metaphor can be so abused. Since exit-
ing the aircraft is a form of escape denied the captives, escape entails avoiding
other people, or producing situations through which their physical copresence
can be ignored, mitigated, or forgotten. If escape from captivity means being
allowed to choose whether or not to watch the film, the ability to select a num-
ber of audio tracks, from music, to comedy, to the film sound track dubbed into
various languages, then logically this would also entail choosing not to engage
others, as the kinds of cooperation required by trivia games, sing-alongs, even
conversation conflict with dominant notions of individual choice.
The advent of noise-canceling headphones exacerbated this process of
separation from the physically copresent and immersion in the fictive repre-
sentations and sounds provided by cinema. As Amar Bose tells it, the idea for
his companys noise-canceling headphones came to him while onboard a plane
in 1978: All I could think about was, My gosh, there must be some way of sep-
arating things that you dont want from things you want.62 Here, headphones
are conceived more as sensory filters than as shields, highlighting the notion
of choice and user agency. Mack Hagood links the active noise-canceling tech-
nology pioneered by Bose, which necessitates microphones to produce sound in
order to make other sounds inaudible, to neoliberalism, calling noise-canceling
headphones the essential gear for the mobile rational actor of the global mar-
ketthe business traveler.63 These headphones often feature over-the-ear cups,
dominating the head of the passenger and further marking the passenger as
someone cut off and separate from others, in contrast to the stethoscope-style
headphones common on airplanes in the 1960s and 1970s. Such headphones
make withdrawal into the headspace of the passenger easier and in concert with
the liquid crystal display complete the techno-cocooning crucial for sensory
privacy and the exertion of control.64
The problem with the term cocoon is that it connotes some sort of trans-
formation for the person swathed in technology; a cocoon, more than a protec-
tive layer, is the locus of transformation from larva to adulthood, something

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that usually does not occur for airline passengers. The term bubble used by Jean
Baudrillard in The Ecstasy of Communication and taken up by sound studies
scholar Michael Bull seems more appropriate.65 Bubbles are transparent. We
can see headphone users in the airplane and on the street. Indeed, this visibility
is a crucial part of the sensory and social protection headphones offer. Bubbles
are fragile and permeable. Headphones can produce a kind of double listening,
in which the listener has to sort through exterior and interior soundscapes
(although noise-canceling headphones buttress this fragility).66 Likewise,
because headphone users are still physically available (and often physically
copresent with others), the bubble created through media technologies can be
burst through touch and gesture, as when the flight attendant comes by with the
food and drink cart, or a neighboring passenger gestures that it is time to use
the restroom. As I have argued elsewhere, the bubble metaphor is particularly
useful because in many contemporary situations, these bubbles are working
together to form what Peter Sloterdijk calls foam.67 Nowhere is this more
apparent than the airplane cabin, in which passengers sit together, side by side,
each using headphones for separate activities like listening to film sound tracks,
music, or video games. This diverse set of sounds would be cacophonous and
unintelligible without headphonesthe acoustic separation of one passenger by
headphones is supported by other passengers using headphonesthus individ-
ual bubbles accrete to each other and in so doing strengthen their walls. What
at first glance seems an antisocial activity is in fact a form of cooperation and
tacit social contract. Crucially, headphones also produce silence and thereby
allow for passengers to converse with each other while others engage media
technologies, or perhaps more rebelliously to talk back to the screen media
in the airplane.
Although ostensibly based in technological necessity born out of the
pursuit of profit, the use of headphones for in-flight cinema found continued
success through its articulation to values of individuality, choice, and freedom.
It is precisely the continued rhetorical emphasis on these values that has given
legitimacy to the emergent form of separated spectatorship. Because separated
spectatorship is contingent on a particular confluence of technology, economic
imperatives, and cultural values of consumer capitalism, the era of the sepa-
rated and secluded spectator who uses technology to create a private space for
individual aesthetic experience and to guard against intrusions from others
may give way to other sorts of technological foams and bubbles. Recently, the
head of a Singapore-based design studio doing work on airplane and automobile
interiors commented on the results of the companys focus group studies: One
thing we have learned is that while Westerners often like to travel in their own
little cocoons, in Asia there is an emerging expectation for more of a family and

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friends experience. Meeting that need will call for new seating arrangements,
shared IFE [in-flight entertainment], and improved provision for privacy and
noise mitigation.68 Taken at face value, this observation suggests that the sep-
arated spectator may be a passing phase, even on board airplanes. At the same
time, that such desires on the part of passengers might necessitate shared
IFE and improved privacy is still commensurate with the bubble and foam
model. Above all, mentioning noise mitigation but not screen size affirms my
argument that spectatorship is defined by listening techniques. Current debates
over screen size, frame rate, and 3D obscure how technological refinements
and innovations of auditory cinema inflect immersion, distraction, choice, and
cinema aesthetics.69 As the phenomenon of separated spectatorship demon-
strates, what differentiates new forms of cinematic experience from classical
spectatorship is as much how we listen as it is how we watch.

Notes

1. Quotation in title from: This Is American Airlines Astrovision, New York Times, September 10,
1964, 22. The author would like to thank Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Greg Waller, James Paasche,
and the anonymous external reader for their suggestions and advice for improving this article.
2. Anne Friedberg, The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change, in Reinventing Film
Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 440.
3. See Mack Hagood, Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space,
American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011): 57389.
4. TWA 707 Flights Will Offer Movies and Popcorn Aloft, New York Times, January 15, 1961, 84.
5. See Stephen Groening, Aerial Screens, History and Technology 29, no. 3 (2013): 28587.
6. Complaints about being forced to watch films birthed the censorship of in-flight movies. See Ste-
phen Groening, Cinema Beyond Territory: Inflight Entertainment and Atmospheres of Globalisation
(London: British Film Institute Publications, 2014), 1047.
7. Gabriele Pedull, In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema (New York: Verso,
2012), 17.
8. Now Showing: First-Run Films on TWA Flights, Skyliner 24, no. 14 (July 24, 1961): 3.
9. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
10. Paul Friedlander, Stars Shine in the Sky, but Literally, New York Times, January 22, 1961, XX14.
11. Chion suggested the term audio-spectator. See Audio-Vision, xxv.
12. Karin Bjisterveld, Acoustic Cocooning: How the Car Became a Place to Unwind, Senses and Society
5, no. 2 (2010): 189211.
13. See Bjisterveld, Acoustic Cocooning; Michael Bull, Personal Stereos and the Aural Reconfigu-
ration of Representational Space, in Technospaces: Inside the New Media, ed. Sally Munt (Lon-
don: Continuum, 2001), 23954; Hagood, Quiet Comfort; Heike Weber, Head Cocoons: A
Sensori-Social History of Earphone Use in West Germany, 19502010, Senses and Society 5, no.
3 (2010): 34347.

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14. By talking for the film, I mean the audience creation of dialog or narration independent of the
films production, something distinct from the lecturer or benshi tradition of the silent era. See
Ab Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008).
15. Groening, Cinema Beyond Territory.
16. Raymond Williams, Dominant, Residual, Emergent, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 12127.
17. Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 19601969, History of American Cinema 8 (New York: Charles Scribners
Sons, 2001).
18. In the 1950s, Boeing spent nearly $250,000 designing seats for its Stratocruiser. Reclining, adjustable
seats were often boxed in pairs of two, facing each other in the fashion of a railway compartment, so
that passengers could enjoy polite conversation with those sitting opposite them. If the aircraft was
not fully booked, passengers could even lie down for the night. Marc Dierlikx, Clipping the Clouds:
How Air Travel Changed the World (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2008), 65.
19. Coach class had been introduced in 1948. Ibid., 5860.
20. In-Flight Motion Pictures Hits IATA Proposal, Aviation Daily 158, no. 33 (April 14, 1965): 26768.
21. Mahlon R. Straszheim, The International Airline Industry (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution,
1969), 14344; Groening, Cinema Beyond Territory, 3031.
22. Coffee, Tea, or Doris Day, Time 84, no. 16 (October 16, 1964): 111; Richard Joseph, Entertainment
in the Air, Washington Post, June 7, 1970, 157.
23. For in-flight cinema and interruption, see Jason Jacobs, Television Interrupted: Pollution or Aes-
thetic?, in Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennet and Niki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), 25580.
24. See Robert Serling, In-Flight Movies Spur Gagsand New Customers, Chicago Tribune, April 21,
1963, H15; Ernie Hudson, 2d Airline Plans Movies on Planes: American Also to Offer TV and Pic-
tures of Takeoffs, New York Times, June 30, 1964, 66; David K. Willis, Now Its Flying Living Rooms,
Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 1964, 1, 4.
25. Sony TR 610 advertisement, Life 47, no. 13 (September 28, 1959): 124.
26. Keir Keightley, Turn It Down! She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 194859,
Popular Music 15, no. 2 (May 1996): 14977.
27. Friedlander, Stars Shine in the Sky, XX14; Serling, In-Flight Movies Spur Gags, H15; TWA from
Washington, Flight International, July 2, 1964, 6 (the quotation marks appear in original and are
likely quotations from the in-flight guide TWA passed out to passengers).
28. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), 15863.
29. Charles Stankievech, From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjec-
tivity, Leonardo Music Journal 17 (2007): 56. The term headspace comes from R. Murray Schafer,
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books,
1974), 118.
30. Stankievech, From Stethoscopes to Headphones, 57.
31. Weber, Head Cocoons, 34347.
32. Ibid., 352.

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33. This is in contrast to American Airlines campaign, which, starting in 1964, relied on showing how
headphones could allow male passengers to work while others (often women) could be entertained
by the film. For more on how airlines gendered in-flight entertainment during this era, see Groening,
Cinema Beyond Territory.
34. Miriam Hansen uses the example of Buster Keatons Sherlock, Jr. (1924) to illustrate this form of
spectatorship. Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 23.
35. Rick Altman, Moving lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism, in Cinema/Sound, ed. Rick Altman, special
issue, Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 68.
36. Ibid., 71.
37. Mary Ann Doane, The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space, in Cinema/
Sound, ed. Rick Altman, special issue, Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 35.
38. Doane, The Voice in the Cinema, 40.
39. Nataa uroviov, Translating America: The Hollywood Multilinguals, 19291933, in Sound
Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, American Film Institute, 1992), 147.
40. Douglas Gomery, Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism: Europe Converts to Sound, in
Cinema/Sound, ed. Rick Altman, special issue, Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 8093.
41. Doane, The Voice in the Cinema, 35.
42. Mark Betz, The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and Polyglot European
Art Cinema, Camera Obscura 16, no. 1 46 (2001): 145.
43. John Mowitt, The Hollywood Sound Tract, in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan
and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 381401.
44. Betz, The Name above the (Sub)Title.
45. TWA 707 Flights Will Offer Movies and Popcorn Aloft, New York Times, January 15, 1961, 84.
46. One Major Reason, Aviation Daily, June 28, 1965, 336.
47. In-Flight Movies, TWA Skyliner, August 27, 1962, 3; Bosley Crowther, Screen: Tour of France in a
Balloon, New York Times, June 19, 1962, 28.
48. Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 19461973 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2010).
49. Pan Am Theatre in the Air, brochure, 1964, Pan American World Airways, Inc., Records, Special
Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, FL (hereafter cited as Pan Am Records).
50. Pan Am to Air Films, Audio Shows on California-Hawaii Flights, 5 May 1965, Pan Am Records.
51. Transport News, New York Times, February 1, 1966, 70.
52. Pan Am Seat Control Units for 747 Airliner, Pan Am Records.
53. Nataa uroviov, Vector, Flow, Zone: Towards a History of Cinematic Translation, in World
Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataa uroviov and Kathleen Newman (New York:
Routledge, 2009), 93.
54. Paul Hofmann, Fun and Games at 30,000 ft., New York Times, February 20, 1966, XX21.
55. Pedull, In Broad Daylight, 35.
56. Paul Young has argued that the dominant codes of cinema promote informatic interactivity
between the medium and the audience over and above sociological interactivity between

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audience members through the medium. Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films
from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxx.
57. American Airlines Announces Astrovision, New York Times, July 21, 1964, 13; This Is American
Airlines Astrovision, New York Times, September 10, 1964, 22; Theyre Flying in Two Different
Worlds: The Story of Astrovision, New York Times, September 25, 1964, 26.
58. Boeing, Entertainment Systems for 747 Superjet Under Study, 23 May 1967, Pan Am Records.
59. Francis Wood, Plugging-In Sound on Jumbo Jetliner, Newsday, March 27, 1969, 118.
60. Let Us Entertain You!, Clipper Inflight Magazine, May 1971, 28.
61. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003). See also
James Hay, Unaided Virtues: The (Neo-)Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere, Television and New
Media 3, no. 1 (2000): 5373; and Shaun Moores, Television, Geography, and Mobile Privatization,
European Journal of Communication 8, no. 3 (1993): 36578.
62. For a fuller discussion of the screening out of certain passengers, see Groening, Aerial Screens.
63. Quoted in Mack Hagood, Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal
Space, American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011): 573. One of the tales of the origins of the
Sony Walkman also involves an epiphany onboard an airplane. See Paul DuGay, et al., Doing Cultural
Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013), 37.
64. Hagood, Quiet Comfort, 574.
65. Bjisterveld, Acoustic Cocooning.
66. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 38; Bull, Personal
Stereos and the Aural Reconfiguration of Representational Space, 23954.
67. Bose is actually moving toward having its new noise-cancelling headphones include sounds
from the real world, mixing in outside sounds for headphone users. This new development in
noise-cancelling technology only further supports my stance that the permeable bubble is the
best metaphor for these new media practices. See Marc Wilson, Boses New Approach to Head-
phones? Let Noise In, Fast Company, June 6, 2016, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3060632/boses
-new-approach-to-headphones-let-noise-in.
68. Groening, Cinema Beyond Territory, 169.
69. Brendan Gallagher, Cabins: Time to Quit the Comfort Zone, APEX, May 16, 2011, accessed Decem-
ber 20, 2011, http://apex.aero/News/AllNews/AssociationNewsCabins/tabid/373/Default.aspx.
70. For an example of the continuing emphasis on image, screen size, and clarity as properly cinematic,
see John Belton, If Film Is Dead, What is Cinema?, Screen 55, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 46070.

Stephen Groening is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative

Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington. He has pub-
lished on media and mobility in Visual Studies, New Media and Society, Keywords,
and History and Technology. He is the guest editor of a recent special issue of Film
Criticism entitled The Aesthetics of Online Videos and the founder of the Seat-
tle Television History Project, an online archive, exhibit, and research resource.
His book, Cinema Beyond Territory: Inflight Entertainment and Atmospheres of
Globalisation, was published in 2014 by British Film Institute Publications.

FIL M HISTORY | VOLUME 28.3