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The book presents a never-before-written case study of the UK-based organisation Secret Cinema – widely considered the leading provider of large-scale immersive experiences in the UK. They are used as a lens through which to understand the wider experiential economy. The book provides a comprehensive and encyclopaedic history of the organisation and its productions. It defines and examines the Secret Cinema format. It critically interrogates the work and operations of Secret Cinema as an organisation and analyses the many layers of audience experience. It combines rigorous academic study with practical industry insight that has been informed by more than fifty in-depth interviews with Secret Cinema practitioners and sector professionals who have worked on immersive productions in areas including performance direction, acting, video design, sound design and composition, lighting design, special effects, stage management, operations and merchandising. Framed within the context of the UK in late-2019, at which point the immersive sector had grown significantly, both through its increasing contribution to UK GDP and its widespread and global recognition as a legitimate cultural offering, we have captured an organisation and a sector that is in transition from marginal and sub-cultural roots to a commodifiable and commercial form, now with recognisable professional roles and practices, which has contributed to the establishment of an immersive experience industry of national importance and global reach. This book will appeal to scholars, students, film fans, immersive experience professionals and their audiences. It is written in an accessible style with rich case study materials and illustrative examples.
‘read’ films without actually taking into account the different modes of film spectatorship in Africa itself. Consequently, we would argue that a potential route out of this impase in thinking about African cinema might be to engage with recent critical work on film spectatorship. Within film studies, questions of identification and alienation have also been central: in various strands of film theory, ‘identification’ has widely
centre. Questions of where and how we watch films will be considered in detail in Chapter 10 ; for the moment, we can just note that the class status of film spectatorship has been contentious since the beginnings of this art form. At the level of production, too, unequal access to educational, financial and technological capital powerfully shapes who gets to make films in the first place. Thus even sympathetic portrayals of a disadvantaged class quite often come not from its own representatives but from filmmakers who originate from outside that social fraction (a
films who wishes to see them scaled-up and amplified in cinema conditions. For the most part, however, film consumers are likely, as occasion demands, to move fluidly between spaces rather than to be confined to one or the other. The home has thus not replaced cinemas, but co-exists with them in a complex economy of film reception. There is, in fact, no unilinear history of exhibition sites; instead, modes of film spectatorship are repeated across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, albeit recurring in different technological guises and with
Be my victim. ( Candyman , 1992) 1 With these words, the Candyman seduces Helen into his dark realm, but they might also apply to the viewer, who is similarly seduced into the fictional worlds created by Clive Barker. In relation to horror film spectatorship, the
Tales ( London : I. B. Tauris , 2010 ), p. 105 . 2 M. Curtis , Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses ( London : Vintage , 2004 ). 3 S. Chaudhuri , Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship ( Edinburgh : Edinburgh University
. Ferrara’s intentionally oblique approach to Body Snatchers ’ diegesis positions the film as not simply a curious genre exercise, but also as a film that challenges the very practice of film spectatorship. Such a move is by no means anomalous to Ferrara’s oeuvre. King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992) are complicated crime films that demand nuanced considerations of the works
visiting before dawn. The representation of women in the film is quite conventional and in line with dominant cinematographic models, thus conforming to Laura Mulvey’s thesis in her seminal article on film spectatorship and identification, regarding how female characters are frequently punished so as to fend off castration anxiety. Indeed, in Prima che il gallo canti, women are represented as either threatening figures who are then fetishised (Pizzardo), are cast as voyeuristic objects of the male gaze (Concia), or appear hysterical and are ultimately desexualised (Elena
) Many critics have examined the quasi-religious/ritualistic aspect of film spectatorship: strangers gather together in a sanctioned, darkened space; a film projector’s beams emit spiritual light in a modernist evocation of altar candles and ceremonial or sacrificial flames. Viewers experience immaterial ‘visions’, silently surrendering ourselves to immortal, almost god-like beings. In the cinema, we
the obsolescence of the satellite dishes that have been prevalent in Algeria since the 1990s. From 2011, French satellite stations have required new digital decoders. It is anticipated that television will remain the primary source of film spectatorship in Algeria, alongside a certain degree of consumption via DVD, including pirate copies. But perhaps the greatest challenge facing Algerian cinema currently remains the