My interest in the history and geography of film venues and audiences sprung from a confluence of intellectual currents running through my studies at UMass Amherst in the mid-late 1980s.

On a conceptual level, British cultural studies motivated empirical research on media audiences as complex configurations of structure and agency where active social and cultural production took place. Cultural studies focused mostly on television back then, and film audiences and venues tended to be subsumed by universalizing theories of spectatorship. At the same time, in cinema studies, an empirical turn energized new studies of early cinema history. The expanding use of primary and archival sources began to reveal a broad, deep, detailed map of that era’s films, audiences, exhibition sites, and intermedial practices. 

For me, what brought cultural studies and empirically grounded film histories together was that both were amenable to the methods and ethos of social history, where a bottom-up, dig-where-you-stand approach validated oral histories and local case studies. Entangled with cultural studies and social history, film history could go far beyond the screen to study specific audiences, communities, and their manifold relations to cinema. Yet, work on early cinema suggested that this era’s diversity of audiences and exhibition practices grew standardized by cinema’s institutionalization in the 1920s.