Overview

Is the experience of watching a film with others in a cinema crucially different from watching a film alone? Does laughing together amplify our enjoyment, and when watching a film in communal rapt attention, does this intensify the whole experience? Attending a film in a cinema implies being influenced by other people, an 'audience effect' that is particularly noticeable once affective responses like laughter, weeping, embarrassment, guilt, or anger play a role. 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. Combining recent scholarly interest in viewers' emotions and affects with insights from the blossoming debate about collective emotions in philosophy and social psychology, this study makes viewers more aware of their own experience in the cinema, and simultaneously opens up a new line of research for film studies.

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9781474414951

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Reviews

Carefully researched...For those looking to learn more about the complex responses of audiences of cinematic art this is the book you should consult. -- Bob Lane, Vancouver Island University, Metapsychology

The Audience Effect is is an immensely important contribution to the phenomenology of cinema. Focused on the much-neglected collectivity of the theatrical film experience, it also touches on other modes of collective viewing, and its rigorous descriptions of the structures, effects, and affects entailed in collective viewing are extraordinarily enlivened by many examples and extremely accessible prose. -- Professor Vivian Sobchack, UCLA This book moves its attention from the images on the screen to the audience gathered in the film theatre and eventually tells 'their' stories. Hanich makes a spectacular shift, and he unfolds a reality that film studies has partly forgotten, as well as cinema's nature as a 'democratic' art. A rigorous and fascinating book that will revamp audience studies. -- Professor Francesco Casetti, Yale For those looking to learn more about the complex responses of audiences of cinematic art this is the book you should consult. -- Bob Lane, Metapsychology The Audience Effect offers an important perspective on how the collective nature of cinema viewing affects an individual's response both to a film and to those around them. Julian Hanich provides a detailed and considered argument for the role that audiences themselves play in the construction of cinemagoing as a cultural and social practice. The book provides a framework which has the potential to provide new insights in audience studies, as well as in film studies more generally. -- James Jones, Screen

Author Information

Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen.

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