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

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• 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