Moving images and sound, made by an industry and completed by an audience.
Ways in
Formal analysis, audience experiments, industry studies, reception studies.
The longer story
Films and cinema have a century of theory. Apparatus theory examined how cinema positions viewers. Cognitivist approaches model how we comprehend moving images. Industry studies examine how films get made and distributed. Reception research asks what audiences actually experience. The 'same' film means differently in cinema, streaming, and airline screen. What is cinema becoming now?