Introduction: Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context—Not Just a Slower Transition to Modernity

Abstract

We offer an overview of what motivates the recent interest in rural cinema audiences and exhibition, in the wake of a long association between cinema and the urban. We explore how this has been fostered by the New Cinema History, which moves away from the explanatory primacy of the film text towards an open-ended study of cinema’s flow through places, spaces, cultural, affective, and institutional sites and is also fundamentally connected to the ‘spatial turn’ in film history (Klenotic, Putting Cinema History on the Map: Using GIS to Explore the Spatiality of Cinema. In R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst, & P. Meers (Eds.), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (pp. 58–84). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Rather than considering rural cinema everywhere as lagging behind the experience of metropolitan modernity in which cinema has been understood to be imbricated, understanding the uneven rural space might challenge our understanding of the globalizing influence of cinema or indeed, of the hegemony of Hollywood. We emphasize how moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of the rural, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world. We also consider the variety of methods that the challenge of studying rural audiences demands, from oral history to programming analysis. We then explore in more depth the rationale for the book’s division into five parts, offering a framework to understand how rural villages and remote towns across the globe experienced ‘hybrid versions of modernity’ (Fuller-Seeley and Potamianos, Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing. In K. Fuller-Seeley (Ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (p. 7). Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).