Cinema, Audiences and Modernity

This book sheds new light on the cinema and modernity debate by confronting established theories on the role of the modern cinematic experience with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.

The book provides a wide range of research methodologies and perspectives on these matters, including:

• the use of oral history methods
• questionnaires
• diaries
• audience letters
• as well as industrial, sociological and other accounts on historical film audiences.

The collection’s case studies thus provide a "how to" compendium of current methodologies for researchers and students working on film and media audiences, film and media experiences, and historical reception.

The volume is part of a ‘new cinema history’ effort within film and screen studies to look at film history not only as a history of production, textual relations or movies-as-artefacts, but rather to concentrate more on the receiving end, the social experience of cinema, and the engagement of film/cinema (history) ‘from below’. The contributions to the volume reflect upon the very different ways in which cinema has been accepted, rejected or disciplined as an agent of modernity in neighbouring parts of Europe, and how cinema-going has been promoted and regulated as a popular social practice at different times in twentieth-century European history.

Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film, Television and Cultural Studies at the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS). His research on film and screen culture as sites of controversy and censorship has been published in Cultural Policy, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Media, Culture & Society, Northern Lights, Studies in French Cinema, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.

Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Deputy Execuive Dean of the Faculty of Education, Humanities, Law and Theology at Flinders University, South Australia. He is Series Editor of Exeter Studies in Film History, and the author of over 50 articles and essays, and the lead investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery projects examining the structure of the distribution and exhibition industry and the history of cinema audiences in Australia.

Philippe Meers is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His publications on popular media culture and film audiences have appeared in Media, Culture and Society, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, The Bulletin, Iluminace and other journals. He is the lead investigator on The 'Enlightened' City-project on the history of film exhibition and film culture in Flanders and Brussels (2005-8, with Daniël Biltereyst and Marnix Beyen).