ABSTRACT

As evidenced most convincingly in the case studies gathered in a series of anthologies, the new cinema history (NCH) has staked out expansive and rich terrain, covering, on the one hand, “economic, industrial, institutional history” focused on distribution and exhibition and, on the other hand, the “socio-cultural history” of audiences, with moviegoing understood as being fully enmeshed in the “conditions of everyday life” (Maltby and Stokes, 2007: 2–4). Ideology and aesthetics, representation and narration, paratexts and promotional strategies, filmmakers and production cultures – these familiar objects of scholarly attention are displaced from the center of concern. The picture show and, even more specifically, the movie theater in one way or another comes to the fore as the “nodal point” in much NCH research, figuring prominently as the target and delivery point of circulation and the social site where cinema was experienced (Klenotic, 2011: 79). This attention to the movie theater is entirely warranted and links NCH projects relying on extensive databases or geographic information system (GIS) technology to a longer tradition of studying film exhibition.