Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context

Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet’s population balance tipped from a predominantly rural makeup towards an urban one, the field of cinema history has demonstrated a disproportionate skew toward the urban. Within audience studies, however, an increasing number of scholars are turning their attention away from the bright lights of the urban, and towards the less well-lit and infinitely more variegated history of rural cinema-going.

Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in A Global Context is the first volume to consider rural cinema-going from a global perspective. It aims to provide a rich and wide-ranging introduction to this growing field, and to further develop some of its key questions. It brings together eighteen international scholars or teams, all representatives of a dynamic, new field. Moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of rural exhibition, distribution and cinema experience, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world. To this end, the volume also innovates by bringing discussions of North American and European ruralities into dialogue with contributions on Kenya, Brazil, China, Thailand, South Africa and Australia.

Daniela Treveri Gennari is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is author of Post-War Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests, and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories, Shared Memories project.

Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor in Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Italy’s Other Women: Gender and Prostitution in Postwar Italian Cinema, 1940-1965, and co-editor of Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema: New Takes on Fallen Women.

Catherine O’Rawe is Reader in Modern Italian Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, and co-editor of The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts.