[ecrea] New Book: The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience.

Hanich, Julian
/The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience./
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 336 p., ill., 23 cm.
Keywords:
- Audience studies -- film
- Aesthetics -- film
- Film studies
- Reception studies -- film
- Film-Philosophy
- Film theory
- Phenomenology
Summary:
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.
Key Features:
- Describes the experiences spectators have when they watch a film
collectively in a cinema
- Provides detailed phenomenological descriptions of how it feels when
viewers laugh, cry and get angry in the cinema
- Investigates film theorists who have previously voiced ideas about the
collective cinema experience such as Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Edgar
Morin, Roland Barthes and Roger Odin
Endorsements:
'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
'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
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Establishing Shot: Definition and History
1. Introduction: What Is the Audience Effect?
2. Excavating the Audience Effect: Precursors in the History of Film Theory
Long Shot: Types of Collective Viewing
Introductory Notes
3. Quiet-Attentive Viewing: Toward a Typology of Collective
Spectatorship, Part I
4. Expressive-Diverted Viewing: Toward a Typology of Collective
Spectatorship, Part II
Medium Shot: On the Cinema’s Affective Audience Effects
5. I, You and We: Investigating the Cinema’s Affective Audience
Interrelations
6. Feeling Close: Conceptualizing the Cinema’s Affective We-Experiences
Close-up: Case Studies of Affective Audience Effects
7. Chuckle, Chortle, Cackle: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Laughter
8. When Viewers Silently Weep: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Tears
9. Distance and Distraction: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Anger
Fade-Out: Conclusion
10. The Audience Effect in the Cinema and Beyond
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.
The Author:
Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University
of Groningen. In his research he focuses on audience emotions and
affects, the film experience, and questions of film style. His first
monograph Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic
Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (2010) was a phenomenological investigation
into the question why viewers enjoy being scared. His articles have
appeared in /Screen/, /Cinema Journal/, /Projections /and many others.
Website
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-audience-effect.html
Sample Chapter:
https://www.academia.edu/35315111/The_Audience_Effect_On_the_Collective_Cinema_Experience
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