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This chapter deals with the connections among photography, cinema, and segregated movie theaters in the United States. It looks through the lens of the movie camera at the anxieties provoked by a seating arrangement that placed socially inferior spectators above their social superiors. Rather than address recent documentary and fiction films in which segregation signs make cameo appearances, this chapter looks back at the formative moment of the teens and twenties, when the cinematic apparatus achieved the classical form that produced the conception of a universal spectator. A close reading of the pivotal scene of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in the Ford Theater in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) suggests that the film's twinned celebrations of cinematography and white supremacy cover a fear of the insurrectionary potential of the theater's segregated balcony as a site that resists, and hence elicits, directorial control. Birth of a Nation is an inevitable, if also overused, fulcrum for opening the question of race and spectatorship in the early twentieth century.

This chapter looks through the other set of lenses that photographers trained on the segregated theater during the 1930s. Movie theaters, unlike most segregated sites, marked only their “colored” entries, since local knowledge could be trusted to ensure that the unmarked front entry would be restricted to whites. At this asymmetrically signed location, documentary photographers bring us to the movies through the entry to the “colored balcony.” By defining a perspective both toward and implicitly from that balcony, their photographs envision modes of resistance to the movie camera's captivating gaze. Disenchantment is implied by a visual insistence on the step-by-step exterior staircase that challenges the fiction of cinematic continuity, and on the play of shadows that calls into question the promise of substance on the screen. Disillusion assumed more tangible forms among the upstairs spectators, whose narratives often recount the covert pleasures of a balcony location that was shielded from surveillance by the white audience downstairs. Reading these photographs and narratives together uncovers the potential for disturbance that was galvanized in different ways by the spatial plans of segregation

The creation in the seventh century BC of a common agora (the Roman Forum) marks the origin of Rome as a city-state. Contemporary evidence from Homer suggests what the agora may have been used for, as do the scenes on terracotta plaques used for the archaic temple at the S. Omobono site in Rome. The S. Omobono statue-group of Hercules and Minerva implies knowledge of contemporary Greek poetry (Stesichorus). The expulsion of Tarquin and the creation of a cult of Liber parallels that of Pisistratus and the cult of Dionysus Eleuthereus at Athens; the satyrs that feature on the decoration of Roman buildings in the sixth and fifth centuries BC presuppose a performance culture. By the fourth century there were purpose-built balconies for ‘spectators’ in the Forum. The Roman calendar provides good evidence for the varied use of Roman public space, with the ‘NP’ days available for performance events.

This chapter examines the evidence for the form of Anglo-Saxon church buildings and how they may have been used. It investigates the architectural evidence that survives for how churches were used liturgically during the conversion period from 600–670 to the eleventh century. It also discusses the purposes of the different parts of the church including altars, chapels, and balconies and other church furnishings such as crucifixion images, baptisteries, and reliquaries and shrines.

Let us now look at the roads and side streets in the Roman Palestinian town. The literary evidence about the width of such streets is somewhat problematic. In the baraita in B. Baba Batra 99ab we read as follows: … A private path is four cubits wide, a path from one town to another is eight cubits, a public path 16 cubits, and a path to the cities of refuge 32 cubits wide. … Likewise, M. Baba Kama .5, in the name of Rabbi Eliezer (late first century C.E.), tells us that a standard public path is 16 cubits wide. If we assume the cubit equals approximately 70 cm, we arrive at the following approximate road widths: … private path 2.80 m (=8.5 ft.) … … from one town to another 5.60 m (=17 ft.) … … public path 11.20 m (=34 ft.) … … to cities of refuge 22.40 m (=68 ft.) … This pattern does not correspond to the standard Roman road measurement. Most major Roman roads were about 16 ft. wide (10.5 cubits) and rarely more than 21.5 ft. wide (14 cubits). The narrower streets (angipontus or semitae) had to be at least 9.57 ft. (2.9 m) wide (a little more than 4 cubits) to allow for projecting balconies. The great trunk roads through Gaul or Italy or along the Euphrates frontier in Syria might be 24 ft. wide (16 cubits). Apparently, some roads were even broader than this, since the Pergamene law states that the minimum width of a main country road must be 30 ft. and that of a byroad 12 ft. Krauss noted these discrepancies, writing that “ordinary Roman stratae were about 5 m wide, making the Rabbinic stratae some 3 m broader, and we do not know wherefore there was this great difference between them.” He adds that in the “Palestinian town of Petra there are remains of the Roman road, which is only 2.8 m wide, and must therefore be considered as a via secundaria, but we cannot determine what is its equivalence in Rabbinic parlance.”