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Audiences
Edited by Ian Christie
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Book Presentation:
This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. 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 behavioral 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habits, while traditional ‘box office’ studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations.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.
With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work 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.
About the Author:
Ian Christie is professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Press Reviews:
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habits, while traditional ‘box office’ studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations.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.
See the publisher website: Amsterdam University Press
> From the same author:
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The Eisenstein Universe (2022)
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Subject: Director > Sergei Eisenstein
Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (2019)
by Ian Christie
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
The Film Factory (2015)
Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939
Dir. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie
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Eisenstein Rediscovered (2014)
Dir. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor
Subject: Director > Sergei Eisenstein
Smith (2014)
by Ian Christie, Martin Herbert, Kathrin Meyer and Ethan de Seife
Subject: Director > John Smith
The Art of Film (2008)
John Box and Production Design
by Ian Christie
Subject: Others persons > John Box
The Cinema of Michael Powell (2005)
International perspectives on an English Filmmaker
Dir. Ian Christie and Andrew Moor
Subject: Director > Michael Powell
The Last Machine (1995)
Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World
by Ian Christie
Subject: Silent Cinema
Inside the Film Factory (1994)
New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema
Dir. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie
Subject: Countries > Russia / USSR
> On a related topic:
The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier (2019)
Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions
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Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship
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Contemporary Screen Ethics (2025)
Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew
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Subject: Theory
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