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There is no doubting the ambition of this book, which the authors declare in their preface ‘launches the “new cinema history”, a body of work that focuses on the circulation and consumption of film and examines cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange' (p. xii). One can forgive a degree of hyperbole in a crowded field, and the introductory essay by Richard Maltby on ‘New cinema histories' qualifies this claim, positioning the book within ‘an emerging international trend in research into cinema history [that] has shifted its focus away from the content of films to consider their circulation and consumption' (p. 1). I will not quibble that a trend which Maltby identifies as emerging over ‘the past 10 years' can in fact be traced back to the first research into historical cinema audiences (as opposed to theoretically constructed spectators) that appeared in Screen in the 1970s, and has been taken forward since the 1980s in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and elsewhere. Maltby is surely correct, however, inasmuch as it is only in the last decade or so that this kind of research has reached a sufficient point of critical mass to be described as a trend. An earlier landmark in this regard was the conference ‘Hollywood and its Audiences', organized by Maltby and Melvyn Stokes at UCL in 1998, which led to four edited volumes published by the British Film Institute between 1999 and 2004.1 This collection is to some extent a successor to those volumes, not only because it also arises from a conference, entitled ‘The Glow in their Eyes: Global Perspectives on Film Cultures, Film Exhibition and Cinema-Going' and held at the University of Ghent in 2007, but also because several of the contributors, including Robert C. Allen, Mark Jancovich, Peter Kramer and Annette Kuhn, are also in the earlier volumes. This is not a case of ‘rounding up the usual subjects', however, for there are also chapters by newcomers, including scholars from the USA, Britain, the Netherlands and Australia. The book also differs from many published conference proceedings in that the essays are of uniformly high quality, and the volume overall is both intellectually coherent and methodologically rigorous.
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