Researching Historical Screen Audiences

by Kate Egan (Editor), Martin Smith (Editor), Jamie Terrill (Editor)

Overview

Showcasing current research and contemporary debate in the field of screen history and audience studies, Researching Historical Screen Audiences draws upon a wide variety of previously untapped sources – including photographs, maps, Mass Observation reports, diaries, fan letters, cinema records and original oral testimonies– to explore the challenges and pleasures of conducting research in this field. Containing twelve new essays from an international group of leading and emerging scholars, the book explores and assesses the current status and shape of the field of historical audience research, showcasing new research which foregrounds the transnational and multi-cultural dimensions of past cinemagoing, the roles played by management personnel and marketing campaigns, and the currently under-explored area of the past reception of home video.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474477826
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr Kate Egan is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Northumbria University

Martin Smith is an independent researcher

Jamie Terrill is a Research Associate on the AHRC funded Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond project

Table of Contents

List of illustrationsAcknowledgementsList of contributors

Introduction

Part I: Being creative in historical audience research: Re-evaluating the field

1. Daniël Biltereyst - Audience as palimpsest, or the structures of cinematic feeling: On historical film audience research and cinema’s imaginative power

2. Annette Kuhn - From cinema culture to cinema memory: a conceptual and methodological trajectory

3. Karina Aveyard - Constructing cinema audience histories: Methodological choices and challenges

Part II: Reconsidering national and transnational cinemagoing histories

4. Karina Pryt - Cinemas and cinema audiences in the ‘third space’ in Warsaw (1908-1939)

5. Wolfgang Fuhrmann - German films in Brazil: Immigration, associations and national film culture

6. James Jones - Emotional communities in the cinema: tracing emotion in Mass Observation cinema records, 1937-1950

Part III: Shaping audience expectations: Cinema managers and marketing strategies

7. Robert James – ‘Make your public curious’: Cinema management, film advertising and audience taste in England, c. 1920-c. 1960.

8. Robert Shail - Harry Sanders: Remembering a life in cinema management

9. Adrian Smith - The Yellow Teddybears: Exploitation as education

Part IV: Home viewing contexts and audience memories

10. Damiano Garofalo - Archives, sources and memories for a history of early Italian TV audiences

11. Martin Smith - The Exorcist in the home: Remembering parental regulation

12. Kate Egan - Childhood Memories of Horror Films in the Home: Questions, Patterns and Contexts

Editorial Reviews

Egan, Smith and Terrill have produced an ambitiously constructed, extensively researched and a truly exciting edited volume. The book offers a wealth of invaluable insights into screen audiences and film cultures more broadly, while showcasing a rich and diverse range of methodologies, periods, settings and contexts. An indispensable contribution to audience historiography.

Daniela Treveri Gennari