The Audience Effect

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, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Vancouver Island University, Metapsychology