Just as American studies has been preoccupied with its disciplinary unconscious in the last decade, cinema studies has been going through its own moment of self-examination. Central to this process has been a loosening of traditional concerns with medium-specificity and the primacy of the film text. Aesthetic approaches have been met with a new, or renewed, impetus to account for people's lived relation with cinema as a cultural institution. Going to the Movies and Hollywood in the Neighborhood are important contributions to this historical and methodological retooling; they purposefully advocate a form of cinema studies that engages with the complex social and cultural history of cinema in everyday life.

Going to the Movies is the fourth volume edited by Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes (this time with Richard C. Allen) and follows three influential volumes published by the British Film Institute that have sought, in different ways, to move the study of cinema towards the history of its audiences. This latest collection is the best yet; it is strident in its attempt to engage cinema studies with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The introduction pulls no punches when assessing the critical shortcomings of screen studies; it skewers the often “solipsistic” (4) and “pseudo-scientific” (1) nature of textual and psychoanalytic film critique, and it mounts a convincing case against a media effects research tradition that, when it comes to the study of audiences, has been “enormously constrained by a preoccupation with harm” (12). Maltby and Stokes argue against a critical tradition that has in various ways “retarded” (4) our understanding of the social history of cinema through its tendency towards theoretical and ideological generalization. They suggest that we are only now beginning to write a history of cinema that, adapting E. P. Thompson's killing phrase, can “rescue the undistinguished membership of cinema's audiences from the condescension of posterity” (3).

Going to the Movies is framed, very properly, as an intervention. It places emphasis on the conjunctures and quotidian experiences that are revealed in “micro-historical studies of local situations, effects and infrastructures” (21). This is explored in twenty stimulating essays, the best of which marry specific historical accounts (of particular cinemas, regions, communities, viewing practices) with a consideration of film-historical method. Jane Gaines's article on the white in race movie audiences is exemplary in this regard, using archival traces to build a snapshot of the white audience for black race movies in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and posing questions about the “relation between the empirical and theoretical spectator” (67). This sits in dialogue with Thomas Doherty's chapter on the desegregation of cinemas in the American South and the civil rights struggles to illegalize “Jim Crow roosts.” Some essays broaden the regional and historical scope by analyzing specific moviegoing debates and practices in Belgium, Britain, Turkey and Africa, while others, such as Charles Acland's perceptive analysis of the contemporary multiplex, consider cinema's “manufactured zones of global cultural traffic” (382).

Many chapters in the book's first section on American moviegoing could equally have appeared in Hollywood in the Neighborhood. Both volumes are concerned, wholly or in part, with local cinema exhibition and share some of the same contributors (Robert Allen, Anne Morey, Richard Abel, Gregory Waller, Terry Lindvall). Robert Allen's attempt to correct film history's obsession with the urban experience of cinema is represented in both volumes. His “modest proposal” on the importance of analyzing rural and small-town moviegoing lies at the heart of the collection by Katherine Fuller-Seeley. Hollywood in the Neighborhood has a parallel agenda to Going to the Movies but is specifically focussed on nonurban audience contexts. Questioning the critical equation between cinema and urban modernity that has shaped much writing on cinema history, the book provides a tour of local moviegoing in the American hinterlands between the early 1900s and the 1950s. The detail of small-town exhibition in places such as Wilmington, Norfolk, Des Moines, and Placerville is rich. While the cumulative journey through these local case studies can feel, at times, rather repetitive, the book provides a textured portrait of cinema beyond the usual metropolitan centres, offering along the way engaging portraits of itinerant movie houses, 1930s bank nights and cinemas with “bad sound and sticky floors” (233).

Of the two collections, Going to the Movies is broader in scope, prepared to move beyond the 1950s in defining the historical and to move out from local cinema exhibition in the US. The movie theatre is not the only site where audiences engage with cinema and the book's inclusion of essays by Haidee Wasson, Gregory Waller and Barbara Klinger on nontheatrical film/venues – on the 1920s Reel of the Month Club, screenings of Depression-era rural farm films, and on the variety of contemporary (home) exhibition settings – helps open out discussion of the social and everyday meaning of cinema in both public and domestic space. Maltby and Stokes suggest that the work in Going to the Movies – “represents what may well come to be seen as being among the most important research in the study of cinema in the last decade” (1). This is a bold statement, but the importance of the social and cultural approach represented so vividly in this collection, and similarly explored in Hollywood in the Neighborhood, makes it justified.