This book sheds new light on the cinema and modernity debate by confronting established theories on the role of the modern cinematic experience with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.

The book provides a wide range of research methodologies and perspectives on these matters, including:

• the use of oral history methods
• questionnaires
• diaries
• audience letters
• as well as industrial, sociological and other accounts on historical film audiences.
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Explorations in New Cinema History brings together cutting-edge research by the leading scholars in the field to identify new approaches to writing and understanding the social and cultural history of cinema, focusing on cinema's audiences, the experience of cinema, and the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange.

• Includes contributions from Robert Allen, Annette Kuhn, John Sedwick, Mark Jancovich, Peter Sanfield, and Kathryn Fuller-Seeley among others
• Develops the original argument that the social history of cinema-going and of the experience of cinema...