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.
Industry Reviews
This volume, edited by experienced and knowledgeable scholars with international reputations, gathers together a fascinating set of essays that, taken together, illuminate the historical relationships among films, moviegoing, and modernity. The focus of this wide-ranging work is Europe, and the justification for this focus is compelling. The bulk of historical scholarship on the experience of cinema, the social experience of moviegoing, the history of cinematic reception, and movies audiences derives from case studies in the United States, dating back to the 1970s. In the meantime, a new generation of film scholars have turned their attention to the quite different contexts within which films were shown and viewed. Exhibition and moviegoing patterns varied markedly not only between national cinemas but also within particular nations. These differences raise interesting questions about the role of religion, language, cultural difference, gender, and ethnicity in patterns of movie exhibition, distribution, reception, and attendance. Having heard presented versions of many of these papers at the conference the co-editors organized in December 2007 at the University of Ghent, I can attest to their quality and to the interest they are likely to generate not only among scholars of European cinema, but also among a wider audience of scholars and students interested in 20th century social and cultural history. Geographic coverage is admirably broad, setting up possibilities for comparative analysis among a number of nations, regions, and locales. Similarly, the chronological coverage is broad: ranging from the early periods of film history through the post-war period. This collection fits very well with a growing literature on the history of the experience of cinema, and it will add significantly to our knowledge base on the particularities and commonalities of European film culture as viewed from the bottom up. Robert C. Allen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
