Experiencing Cinema / Ephemeral Cinema

Abstract

This review examines two recent publications which explore cinema exhibition, alternative viewing practices, audience and reception studies. The books are María A Vélez-Serna’s Ephemeral Cinema Spaces: Stories of Reinvention, Resistance and Community (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and Emma Pett’s Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021). Both of these books explore notions of cinema in different spaces and the contrasting ways in which audiences, consumers, patrons, and viewers make use of different kinds of moving images.