Film is often conceived as a medium that is watched rather than experienced. Existing studies of film audiences, and of media reception more broadly, have revealed the complexity of viewing practices and cultures surrounding cinema-going and its exhibition spaces. Experiencing Cinema offers the first in-depth study of participant engagement with a range of experiential media forms derived from cinema culture. From sing-a-long screenings to theatrical extravaganzas, a broad spectrum of alternative film-going practices and immersive spaces are explored and analysed in this original audience study. Moving from intimate community gatherings to blockbuster urban venues, from isolated farmhouses to Olympic stadia, Experiencing Cinema considers the lure and value of these popular events. Often attracting a diverse, intergenerational range of participants, from early-adopter urban hipsters to DIY rural communities, the growing demand for participatory cinema within the contemporary marketplace is analysed alongside broader debates circulating around the move away from traditional tiered seating and increased audience mobility and the de-centring of the film text.

Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.

In this innovative book, Julian Hanich explores the subjectively lived experience of watching films together, to discover a fuller understanding of cinema as an art form and a social institution that matters to millions of people worldwide.

Literary Nonfiction. Cinema Studies. Revised 3rd Edition. Devotional Cinema offers an exploration into the language of film, reprised from a lecture on religion and cinema delivered at Princeton University. The new edition includes additions and changes related to the author's understanding of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc as well as other smaller clarifications. Dorsky has been making and exhibiting films within the avant-garde tradition since 1964.

The Film Experience is a comprehensive introduction to film that treats students as the avid movie fans they are while surpassing all other texts in helping them understand the art form’s full scope, breadth, and depth. Like other introductory texts, it offers strong coverage of film’s formal elements, but goes further by situating this formal knowledge in the larger cultural contexts that inform the ways that we all view film. The authors’ rich narrative integrates the cultural history of film throughout and demonstrates how the elements, practices, economics, and history of the medium contribute to a film’s many possible meanings. The outstanding art program — now in full color — visually reinforces all the key concepts and techniques discussed in the text.

An imprint of University of New England.

Investigates how progressivism structured many aspects of understudied era of cinema. Caught between the older model of short film and the emerging classic era, the transitional period of American cinema (1907-1917) has typically posed a problem for studies of early American film. Yet in Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907-1917, author Moya Luckett uses the era's dominant political ideology as a lens to better understand its cinematic practice. Luckett argues that movies were a typically Progressive institution, reflecting the period's investment in leisure, its more public lifestyle, and its fascination with celebrity. She uses Chicago, often considered the nation's most Progressive city and home to the nation's largest film audience by 1907, to explore how Progressivism shaped and influenced the address, reception, exhibition, representational strategies, regulation, and cultural status of early cinema. After a survey of Progressivism's general influences on popular culture and the film industry in particular, she examines the era's spectatorship theories in chapter 1 and then the formal characteristics of the early feature film-including the use of prologues, multiple diegesis, and oversight-in chapter 2. In chapter 3, Luckett explores the period's cinema in the light of its celebrity culture, while she examines exhibition in chapter 4. She also looks at the formation of Chicago's censorship board in November 1907 in the context of efforts by city government, social reformers, and the local press to establish community standards for cinema in chapter 5. She completes the volume by exploring race and cinema in chapter 6 and national identity and community, this time in relation to World War I, in chapter 7. As well as offering a history of an underexplored area of film history, Luckett provides a conceptual framework to help navigate some of the period's key issues. Film scholars interested in the early years of American cinema will appreciate this insightful study.