The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience By Julian Hanich Is the experience of watching a film with others in a cinema crucially different from watching a film alone? Does laughing together amplify our enjoyment, and when watching a film in communal rapt attention, does this intensify the whole experience? And what about being angry about annoying spectators? Attending a film in a cinema implies being influenced by other people, an 'audience effect' that is particularly noticeable once affective responses like laughter, weeping, embarrassment, or anger play a role. In this book, Julian Hanich explores the subjectively lived experience of watching films together, to discover a fuller understanding of cinema as an art form and a social institution. Combining recent scholarly interest in viewers' emotions and affects with insights from the blossoming debate about collective emotions in philosophy and social psychology, this study makes viewers more aware of their own experience in the cinema, and simultaneously opens up a new line of research for film studies. Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen