ONLINE: Getting Drunk with the Movies: Exhibition and Prohibition

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Richard Leson

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is an associate professor of English and film studies in the College of Letters and Science at UW-Milwaukee.

Imbibing while watching a flick may be a common activity during this stay-at-home winter, but this UW Center for the Humanities lecture instead takes us back to public gatherings a century ago. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, an associate professor of film studies and English at UW-Milwaukee, will talk about how theater owners during the silent era responded to the 18th Amendment's banning of alcohol sales. Register here for a Zoom link.

press release: Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, associate professor of English and film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

What were the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment on America’s second-favorite pastime after drinking: moviegoing? In this UW Center for the Humanities virtual Friday Lunch talk, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece looks at theatrical exhibition just before, during, and after prohibition and discusses the ways in which federal and state governance affected how theater owners integrated, resisted, or sought out the demon booze as a spectatorial companion. 

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a cultural historian of American film, exhibition, and spectatorship. She is the author of The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the co-editor of Ends of Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).