ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|16 pages

Cinema, Audiences and Modernity

An Introduction

part I|98 pages

Cinema, Tradition and Community

chapter 2|16 pages

Spaces of Early Film Exhibition in Sweden

1897–1911

chapter 3|15 pages

Moviegoing Under Military Occupation

Düsseldorf, 1919–25

chapter 4|14 pages

‘Christ is Coming to the Elite Cinema'

Film exhibition in the Catholic South of the Netherlands, 1910s and 1920s

chapter 5|17 pages

Imagining Modern Hungary Through Film

Debates on national identity, modernity and cinema in early twentieth-century Hungary

chapter 6|18 pages

The Cinematic Shapes of the Socialist Modernity Programme

Ideological and economic parameters of cinema distribution in the Czech Lands, 1948–70 1

chapter 7|16 pages

‘The Management Committee Intend to Act as Ushers'

Cinema Operation and the South Wales Miners' Institutes in the 1950s and 1960s 1

part II|87 pages

Audiences, Modernity and Cultural Exchange

chapter 8|13 pages

Urban Legend

Early cinema, Modernization and Urbanization in Germany, 1895–1914

chapter 9|12 pages

Diagnosis: ‘Flimmeritis'

Female cinemagoing in Imperial Germany, 1911–18

chapter 10|12 pages

Afgrunden in Germany

Monopolfilm, cinemagoing and the emergence of the film star Asta Nielsen, 1910–11

chapter 11|12 pages

‘Little Italy on the Brink'

The Italian diaspora and the distribution of war films in London, 1914–18

chapter 12|20 pages

Hollywood in Disguise

Practices of exhibition and reception of foreign films in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s

chapter 13|16 pages

Negotiating Cinema's Modernity

Strategies of control and audience experiences of cinema in Belgium, 1930s–1960s