The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience

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.

• 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