The Invention of the Spectator. How has Early film Spectatorship shaped Audience and Reception Theory

Spectatorship Before Theory : A Revisited History of Early Cinema Audience Studies (1900-1915)

This monograph reconstructs the intellectual genealogy of audience theory, shifting the historiographical focus to the often-overlooked decades preceding the Weimar period (pre-Kracauer). It contests the prevailing academic narrative that reduces pre-1920s cinema inquiries to mere quantitative demographics or moral surveillance. Instead, the text demonstrates that the years 1900-1915 generated a sophisticated, albeit fragmented, body of theoretical work regarding the social and psychological dimensions of moviegoing.
Embedded within the structural shifts of industrial modernity, capitalism, and metropolitan growth, the analysis identifies how early scholars conceptualized the cinema as a primary agent of cultural production. The book aggregates disparate sources from psychology, sociology, and urban studies to reveal a coherent discourse on spectatorship. It argues that these initial observers identified the audience not as a passive mass, but as a collective engaged in active cultural negotiation and psychological processing.
By retrieving these archival sources, Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb maps the transition from initial curiosity to systematic academic inquiry. It provides a detailed account of how the "moving picture" was understood as a vector for social interaction and consciousness formation long before the canonization of classical film theory. This study offers a revised timeline for the discipline, locating the origins of reception studies in the immediate friction between early audiences and the screen.