Audiences

Ian Christie is a film historian and curator, currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a visiting professor and fellow at universities in Chicago, Tampa, Stockholm, Canberra, Paris and Olomouc, and at Gresham College in London 2017-21, as well as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006. He has written and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam; and contributed to many exhibitions

Following previous volumes in the Key Debates series, Audiences engages with one of the most important shifts in recent Film Studies – the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer or audience of films. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the ‘effects’ of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioural world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional ‘box office’ studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. This collection spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms. Among the contributors are Martin Barker (Aberystwyth) on audience response to ‘alternative content’ in cinemas today; Ranita Chatterjee (University of Westminster) on Calcutta’s early segregated audiences; Karel Dibbets (Amsterdam) on deducing cinemagoing preferences; Torben Grodal (Copenhagen) on spectators’ cognition; Nicholas Hiley (University of Kent) on the unruly early audience; Laurent Jullier (Paris 3) and Jean-Marc Leverrato (Metz) on cinephilia on the web; Roger Odin (Paris) on viewing mobile phone films; Annie van den Oever (Groningen) on the dialectic of cinema and television spectatorship; John Sedgwick (London Metropolitan) and Clara Pafort Overduin (Utrecht) on using large datasets to study audience behaviour; Judit Thissen (Utrecht) on New York’s Nickelodeon era; Gregory Waller (Indiana) on the non-theatrical audience.

• Audiences - 2 Contents - 6 Editorial - 8 Acknowledgments - 10 Introduction: In Search of Audiences - 12 Part I Reassessing Historic Audiences - 24 “At the Picture Palace”: The British Cinema Audience, 1895-1920 - 26 The Gentleman in the Stalls: Georges Méliès and Spectatorship in Early Cinema - 36 Beyond the Nickelodeon: Cinema going, Everyday Life and Identity Politics - 46 Cinema in the Colonial City: Early Film Audiences in Calcutta - 67 Locating Early Non-Theatrical Audiences - 82 Understanding Audience Behavior Through Statistical Evidence: London and Amsterdam in the Mid-1930s - 97 PART II New Frontiers in Audience Research - 112 The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and Their Dialectics - 114 Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: The Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution - 129 Cinephilia in the Digital Age - 144 Spectator, Film and the Mobile Phone - 156 Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May Take Us - 171 PART III Once and Future Audiences - 186 Crossing Out the Audience - 188 The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory - 207 Operatic Cinematics: A New View from the Stalls - 219 What Do We Really Know About Film Audiences? - 226 Notes - 236 General Bibliography - 280 Notes on Contributors - 300 Index of Names - 306 Index of Film Titles - 312 Index of Subjects - 316