RELOCATING AMERICAN FILM HISTORY

This essay argues that one of the legacies of ‘grand theory’ in film studies is an ambivalence toward the spatial and social conditions of the cinematic experience. This suspicion of the empirical has also conditioned scholarship on the history of movie audiences and reception. The history of moviegoing in the American South underscores the importance of space, place, and sociality as constitutive features of the experience of cinema.