ABSTRACT
This volume has addressed the question of how cinema was conceived as both an outcome and a catalyst of modernity in various historical European settings. Its contributors have illustrated different ways of looking at cinema as a contingent part of modernization, addressing questions of cinema’s social and cultural embeddedness and taking into account the everyday practices of distributing, exhibiting and consuming motion pictures, as well as their production and interpretation. In relation to the cinemamodernity debate, the collection’s authors have to some extent confirmed that cinema was characterized in terms of novelty, dynamism, shock, sensationalism and entertainment; that movies were often considered to advance new or foreign (mostly American) and sometimes disturbing stories and values on issues such as femininity or consumerism; and that the act of cinemagoing was often associated with the metropolitan experience and with audiences willing to be immersed in the distracting world of cinema. 1
