Abstract: This chapter examines how advertising posters for cinematographic shows with tricked or dynamic seats presented in theatres explicitly reflect, by their rhetoric, an ideal immersive spectatorial experience. Using advertising materials from 1959 for the film The Tingler and the Percepto gimmick, and from 2010s by the D-Box company, the author studies how the tricked or dynamic seat is sold to the public as a promise to better immerse themselves in the world of a film through the sense of touch. The article also considers how the spectatorial postures conveyed by the advertisements depict immersion quite similarly from one era to another.

Keywords: gimmick, advertisement, spectatorship, exhibition

The seat, as it always is in direct contact with the spectator when they watch a film, is central to the reception apparatus of cinematographic works. Indeed, it is rather rare that we experience films standing up or lying down. However, this piece of furniture is generally considered secondary to cinema's apparatus, since it does not appear to participate in the expressive codes of cinema, unlike the format or ratio of the image or the spatialization of sound, for example. Thus, except when it comes to choosing an optimal seat in the theatre in order to see the screen, to hear the sound effects all around, and not to be invaded by the proximity of neighbours, and except in cases where it might be broken or uncomfortable, the seat—like the film theatre itself nowadays—is usually forgotten during the film's screening. Moreover, this particular piece of the cinematographic apparatus has so far received very little attention from scholars. Among the few publications devoted to this subject is Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece's article, “Revisiting the Apparatus: The Theatre Chair and Cinematic Spectatorship” (2016), in which the author studies texts written by architects who designed film theatres and analyzes the way they considered this piece of furniture. Among others, she quotes Ansel M. Moore, an architect who described his vision of the ideal seat in a 1939 Boxoffice Magazine article: