The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema 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.

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

About 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.

Review :
Carefully researched...For those looking to learn more about the complex responses of audiences of cinematic art this is the book you should consult. For those looking to learn more about the complex responses of audiences of cinematic art this is the book you should consult. Hanich has written The Audience Effect as an exercise in phenomenology, or, the philosophical analysis of forms of perception and engagement, their workings and implications. Watching films is seen not just as a visual, or even aural, process, but one engaging all aspects of a person, and (just about) all parts of our bodies. [...] There’s little doubt that to those drawn to this approach, Hanich’s book will be a significant addition. Hanich has written The Audience Effect as an exercise in phenomenology, or, the philosophical analysis of forms of perception and engagement, their workings and implications. Watching films is seen not just as a visual, or even aural, process, but one engaging all aspects of a person, and (just about) all parts of our bodies. [...] There’s little doubt that to those drawn to this approach, Hanich’s book will be a significant addition.' The definition and function of "the audience" in the whole cinematic equation has been taken for granted and, so, left at an unhelpful level of generality even as it morphs into something utterly different. Hanich seeks to remedy this state of affairs and in so doing flexes some syncretistic muscles, surveying a breathtaking range of sources from a vast span of time periods, paradigms, and disciplines. […] Hanich gives us good reasons to hope the uniqueness and power of the audience experience will enable it to survive in some form or another. But what, exactly, is this uniqueness and power? It’s the sort of thing we think we understand, but do not pay careful enough attention to. Fortunately, Hanich does. 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. ... An impressive essay... 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.' 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. 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. '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.'