Visual Communities
Comparative analysis of film preferences in Europe.
Social history of film-going in colonial south India
Social history of film-going in colonial south India
Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life: A study of cinema-going in its peak and decline
The project, Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life: A study of cinema-going in its peak and decline (2019-2022), aims to further our knowledge of how cinema was present in the lives of people in 1950s and 1960s Sweden and to deepen our understanding of how cinema-going is remembered as woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Cultural Memory and British Cinema
We are interested in the memories of people who went to the cinema in 1960s Britain. This includes the films and stars they watched, the location of favourite cinemas, the rituals of going there, the people they went with and the character of the experience more generally. This was a time of significant social change […]
Cinema audiences in Philadelphia
The project entails processing and analyzing extant weekly billing sheets from the archive of the Stanley-Warner theater chain at USC. This unparalleled resource has not previously been organized or accessed. The data include information about film programs, film rental costs, and daily box- office reports from 122 theaters in the Philadelphia exchange during 1935-1936. It […]
Mapping Movies
Where, when, and in what geographic contexts were women able to enter the film exhibition business as it grew from a technological novelty into a major industry and fixture of the modern American landscape? Mapping Movies prompts these new questions and more, exploring cinema’s emergent social and spatial environments by developing a Geographic Information System […]
Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain
The cultures and everyday practices around cinemagoing and film fandom in Britain in the 1930s
Provincialising Bollywood
Among the many histories that can possibly be written of Indian cinemas, one would be around the axes of family audience. In mainstream cinema addressing bourgeois urban audiences traditionally addressing the family as the smallest unit of spectatorship, cinema was already situating itself in contrast with the public life in Indian cities where the place […]
Sensationalism and early cinema
Reception of 1920s US cinema
My Ph.D. dissertation (defended 2011) looked at how 1920s US cinema reception discourses organized audiencing processes as a blurring of perceptual frontiers, and notably as regards to the expectation of « realism ». I am now engaged in refining my understanding of 1920s US film reception by focusing on its intermedial dimension.
