.

Volume 13, Issue 1

May 2016

Introduction – Inside-the-scenes: The rise of

experiential cinema

Sarah Atkinson & Helen W. Kennedy

This Themed Section is part of the editors’ wider collaborative research project that
examines the phenomenon of live cinema from a range of perspectives. Along with this
Section, these include an industry report, a network, a conference, and a number of
academic publications (including Atkinson & Kennedy, 2017).
The industry report is part-funded by Arts Council England and will be delivered
through a collaboration between the editors and Lisa Brook of Live Cinema UK. This report
tracks the economic scale of augmented cinema exhibition, making use of our proposed
typology of the form set out below in order to categorise recent work. The report begins to
analyse the potential impact in terms of future talent development, technological
innovation and economic potential. We situate live cinema within a wider context of shifts
towards an increasingly participatory cultural and creative economy. This wider project will
also establish a network of representatives from industry, advocacy groups, exhibitor
networks, academics and creative. This network will be the mechanism through which we
establish symposia, a regular conference and other events to support the development of
the experiential live cinema field. The development of the network has been facilitated by
Kings Cultural Institute (King’s College, London, UK) and will include: British Film Institute
(BFI), No Nation, National Theatre (NT) Live, Royal Opera House, Edible Cinema, Rooftop
Film Club and the Event Cinema Association (ECA).
The research publications generated by the wider project are particularly concerned
with understanding the shifts in audience experience signalled by these innovations. We
have published two articles (Atkinson & Kennedy 2015a & 2015b) that both take Secret
Cinema as their focus and offer new analytical tools for the consideration of these hybrid
cultural phenomena. The work of this Participations Themed Section will subsequently be
developed to address the emergent issues that we outline in the conclusion of this article (in
Atkinson & Kennedy, 2017).
This Themed Section focusses on the growing trend toward the creation of a cinema
that escapes beyond the boundaries of the auditorium whereby film-screenings are
augmented by synchronous live performance, site-specific locations, technological

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intervention, social media engagement, and all manner of simultaneous interactive

moments including singing, dancing, eating, drinking and smelling – what we are describing
as the broader field of experiential cinema. Whilst recognizing that these experiences are
not radically new (some belong in a continuum of peripheral marketing around film
screenings that have existed since early cinema) we do now see these previously marginal
experiences (i.e. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975) beginning to find access to a much
wider public, alongside a significant rise in organisations dedicated to the design and
delivery of augmented cinematic main events.1 In our wider project and here in this
Themed Section we make a clear distinction between work which considers ‘event- led’
cinema - the creation of live events around a particular film screening, and its contrasting
proposition - ‘event cinema’ - the coverage of live events in cinema auditoria - such as sport,
opera and theatre - around which there is already much lively academic discussion (Barker,
2013), and an organization established to support such activities2. A report into the impact
of this latter form of ‘event cinema’ was commissioned by the Arts Council and BFI and the
outcomes published on 15th January, 2016 (Tuck & Abrahams, 2016). The examples of
experiential cinema here are situated within the context of a growing demand for
atmospheric, immersive and participatory cinematic experiences and the recent turn
towards event-led distribution models and technically augmented engagements within a
burgeoning experience economy. This area presents a fertile site for analysis and one that
remains relatively untapped within past and current academic literature. This Themed
Section brings together the latest audience research into these areas to interrogate and
explore experiential cinema and to provide deepened understandings of recent immersive
cinema phenomena through the analysis of audience perspectives. The articles examine
social and technological imperatives that underpin live cinema innovations; and evolve new
conceptual frameworks and language of analyses suitable for their study.
Much of the work for this Themed Section took place during what we describe as the
UK’s “Summer of Live” – 2015 saw a veritable explosion of live augmented experiences –
including some very high profile commercial and critical successes. This summer of live
comprised at least these immersive events: Secret Cinema presents … Star Wars: The Empire
Strikes Back,3 Sneaky Experience’s Wizard of Oz, Sneaky ‘Wonderland’ Experience,
screenings of Alice’s Adventures Underground (les enfants terribles),4 Phillip Pullman’s
Grimm Tales at the Oxo Tower London,5 Heart Break Hotel, 6 Against Captain’s Orders: A
Journey into the Uncharted – an immersive theatrical performance by PunchDrunk at The
National Maritime Museum, London, UK.7 There was a programme of open-air cinema
screenings and the summer programme of Sing-a-Long-a,8 and the largest season of Open Air
Cinema9 concluded its 125 outdoor screening run in locations across the UK.
This summer season also featured one exceptionally hybrid event – a blend of event
cinema with live cinema (according to the distinctions we articulate above) – a one-off
theatre performance of Rocky Horror Show Live10 – which was broadcast live from west end
to cinemas all over the world.

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This trend towards liveness continued to persist and pervade increasingly

mainstream spaces well in to the autumn – for example at BFI’s summer love weekend a
number of outdoor screenings were hosted at the British Museum11 and The Big LOVE Tea
Dance took place at Leeds International Film Festival.12 An immersive promenade
performance for the launch of Suffragette (2015) was staged in Huddersfield.13 A much
vaunted video game soundtrack also featured as a live immersive event during a tour of
Silent Hill Live14 – Akira Yamaoka, the video game composer for numerous games,
performed music from Silent Hill (Konami, 1999-).
A live scoring of La Haine15 (1995) was staged at the Sensoria Festival which also
hosted a “Doing it Live: Commissioning Live Cinema” panel.16
On the same night at the IMAX in London, the science museum in collaboration with
Edible Cinema delivered an eat-along rendition of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory. (2005) 17 This summer of live also featured its own an anti-experience - Dismaland
– UK graffiti artist Banksy’s ‘bemusement park’18– presented an aberrative augmentation of
the decaying (film-themed) theme park. This summer of live comprised many more
experiences far beyond those connected to cinema of course (for example the Tate
Sensorium19) but this illustrative roster of events reveals the heterogeneity of those which
do fit in to our category of experiential cinema. To wrangle this diversity and to provide
analytical coherence for future research and descriptive rigour we propose that we classify
this spectrum of creative interventions according to the following typography:

Enhanced: At the most basic form of intervention we have the category of enhanced which
would include outdoor and open air screenings. The physical experience is often enhanced
but this is not relative to the story of the film. This would include a range of differently sited
screenings such as Brighton’s Big Screen, Luna Cinema, Drive-In Film Club and Rooftop Film
Club and those making use of other heritage locations. Critically here the filmic text itself is
left entirely untouched. It is the social experience of film reception that is given some
degree of enhancement.

Augmented: Augmented cinema adds a further dimension to the filmic text through: the
site – situating the screening in a location relevant to the film itself – eg. Harry Potter at
Kirkstall Abbey20; through sensory enhancement (smellovision, taste-a-longs, stereoscopic
3D, 4DX); and elements of non-interactive performance. This category would also therefore
include auditory modes of augmentation such as the following – Live scored are those
where the full original score is played with the film exactly as originally intended, retaining
all other elements of the film soundtrack remain audible. In the summer this included a
season at the Royal Albert Hall that included Interstellar (2014)21, Back to the Future
(1985)22 and The Godfather (1972)23. Re-scored events are those in which the original
soundtrack is either completely dubbed over or new elements are mixed in. Examples of
this form include Run Lola Run (1998)24, La Haine (1995) and Battle of Algiers (1966).25
October 2015 saw the final performance of the UK tour of a live re-scoring of George Lucas’s

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THX 1138 (1971) by Asian Dub Foundation. A unique score was composed by the band and
played live alongside the film’s screening, interwoven with the film’s original soundtrack.
This is one of the first times this has been done in this way: re-scorings are usually
performed to silent films and foreign language films (where it isn’t crucial for an English-
speaking audience to hear the original soundtrack as the subtitles are projected onto the
screen). At the Brighton finale26 the performance was attended by sound designer Walter
Murch, and during our interview with him afterwards described the experience thusly: “It’s
like being the author of a 19th century novel who then sees that novel being turned into an
opera.” (Murch, 2015)
Although these examples included in some cases very complex live performative
elements – this is not figured within our typology as an interactive mode and is always
bound within the temporality of the originary text and the experiences deploy a
conventional arrangement of bodies and the screen. For instance, in ranked seating even if
in some alternative site.

Participatory: The participatory category always includes some element of audience direct
engagement in elements of the originary text and this category itself includes its own
spectrum of immersive intensity. At one end we might situate sing-along-a (which has
become its own genre with some commercial success); cult quote-alongs (including some
shout-alongs as we shall see in this Themed Section (Vivar 2016)); moving through to
cosplay, dance-alongs, (Rocky Horror Picture Show being the most well-established example
which features all of these elements). At the furthest extreme we would situate Secret
Cinema which is the subject of two of the articles featured in this Section.
Walter Murch’s presence at the live re-scoring event discussed above signalled that
experiential cinema had passed a landmark moment. These events have become
mainstream, achieving significant box office success and commercial gain. They have also
been accepted by the film industry as a normalised part of the distribution and development
of a film. As a matter of course, decisions in Hollywood around whether or not there will be
an orchestral/live distribution strategy are made from the outset (Murch 2015).
A stand out commercial success in this Summer of Live which underscores Murch’s
contention that this is a genre which has come of age was Secret Cinema’s immersive
rendition of The Empire Strikes Back event which sold 100,000 tickets, ran for a four-month
period and generated £7 million at the box office.
We propose that the growth in the popularity and significance of these events can
be attributed to four key factors – technological, commercial, cultural and artistic.
In terms of the technological – the industry has burgeoned as a result of the rapid
advancement of ‘pop-up’ screen technology (such as inflatable screens and directional
audio) enabling screenings to take place in locations that have been hitherto inaccessible
(Hampton Court Palace & Kew Gardens as two recent examples). Further developments in
4DX, creative uses and investments in the potentials of Oculus Rift and VR technologies,

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smartphone second screen applications (see Svensson and Hassoun, this Section) are all
offering up new opportunities for the enhancement or augmentation of film engagements.
Commercially, in the same way that the music industry has re-focused its revenue
generation to live events in response to file sharing where music has become freely
accessible and easy to obtain, the film industry is responding to the free online access to
films in having to offer ‘more’ to a cinema visit. The research which informs our
forthcoming report has shown that at least half of all independent exhibitors had included
live cinema in their programme in 2014-2015 (274 of 576 BFI listed exhibitors).27
Culturally, the industry has also expanded in response to the public’s love for
nostalgia and the power of fan engagement – many events tend to be about ‘old’ and well-
loved film releases – Secret Cinema Present ... Back to the Future (Atkinson & Kennedy
2015a) was one such example 2014. The fannish and cult experience central to the
popularity of genre film features heavily in the articles gathered here and nostalgia features
as a key facet of the experiential cinema register of engagement under discussion in this
Themed Section.
Artistically, this new form also offers audiences a deeper emotional engagement
with the film. In our interview, Murch recalled a moment of anticipating these latent
possibilities during the 1971 scoring session for THX 1138:

It was electrifying to see a film energised by 80 musicians recording that

music, and I thought at the time, and this was 45 years ago, wouldn’t it be
great to allow ordinary people to experience this. (Murch, 2015)

Early cinema history has taught us that new forms of exhibition and audience engagement
have driven the evolution of new film genres and new techniques in filmmaking. For
example, the explosion of Nickelodeon movie theatres in the USA (known as penny gaffs in
the UK) in 1908, led to the creation of the fiction film and the film studio system in order to
provide a constant flow of viewing material for a growing audience cheaply and efficiently.

The increase in demand from nickelodeons caused changes in the pattern of

film production, too. From 1907 there was a marked shift towards the
production of fictional narratives, rather than the ‘scenics’ and ‘topicals’ that
had featured in earlier programming. (Maltby, 1989:39)

The rise of the drive-in in 1950s cinema culture spawned the teen-movie and exploitation
genre in order to fill the double and triple bills that the audiences demanded. This reference
to the early progenitors of genre innovation and technological adaptation does not assume
a teleological model of cinematic developments but rather we are proposing that these
shifts are cyclical so that we can see traces of early cinema and the cinema of attractions in
this current process of quite rapid change (see Atkinson & Kennedy 2015a).

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We argue that the current growth of live cinema exhibition and distribution will have
the same impact as the form expands as we have already noted that certain films are being
chosen for enhancement, augmentation or participation specifically because of the
characteristics which make them suitable for these kinds of exhibition. For example, THX
1138 worked because of its sparse dialogue, meaning that the live music could be woven in
effectively, still enabling the audiences to hear the dialogue and original sound score. As
demonstrated in Atkinson & Kennedy in this Themed Section, The Empire Strikes Back
screening and pre-event build-up was infused with the theme of a rebellion and secrecy,
which was germane to the film’s original narrative. This facilitated and secured the
audiences investment and willingness to engage in the experience, purchasing costumes
from the pop-up and online shops, and bringing along props as instructed (see Pett, and
Atkinson & Kennedy in this Themed Section).
We propose that in the future generic conventions and production practices and
processes will respond directly to these enhanced, augmented and participatory models in
the development and production phases. Film aesthetics, style and process will evolve as a
result, and we are likely to see films being made specifically for these experiential
presentations. In turn we would also hope that these developments would generate a more
secure distribution platform, the lack of which has been identified as inhibiting some
aspects of the artistic and economic evolution of this form (see forthcoming Brook, Atkinson
& Kennedy, 2016).
The selected articles featured here comprise a transnational perspective through
which to address the two key aims of this Themed Section – to advance the study of
experiential cinema and to exemplify emergent audience methodologies adapted to the
complexities of this form. We begin with an article by Emma Pett, ‘“Stay Disconnected”:
Eventising Star Wars for Transmedia Audiences’ which extends the work of a well-
established field of analysis around fan engagements with the Star Wars Universe (Brooker,
2002 and 2009 and Hills, 2005). Pett’s article deploys participant observation, ethnography
and auto-ethnography to study these fan engagements with Star Wars across two specific
sites – the Madam Tussauds exhibition and the Secret Cinema Presents ... Empire Strikes
Back live cinema experience.
Pett examines how these recent experiences have the potential to extend the
opportunity for devoted fans to engage with their beloved texts – including for the Secret
Cinema Presents experience the fannish pleasures of cosplay. She also identifies how the
tight structuring of the experiences leads to frustrations with the lack of engagement or
failures of immersion. Pett examines the motivations and pleasures of these cult
engagements whereby a brand (or storyworld) is pursued across multiple sites and distinct
media. She also situates the marketing and promotions of these events in relation to how
they draw upon and deploy a particular discourse of exclusivity and liveness in their
establishment of and access to this cult identity and these fan subjectivities. What Pett also
foregrounds is the ever-present tension between these commercialized and highly
constructed engagements and fan initiated practices and behaviours even when these are

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apparently invited and facilitated (such as in the cosplay pleasures invoked but proscribed in
the Secret Cinema experience).
Still very much in this territory of genre fiction and its invocation of cult pleasures
and keenly anticipated formulas – Alexander Svensson and Dan Hassoun in their article
‘“Scream Into Your Phone”: Second Screen Horror and Controlled Interactivity’ – articulate
the ways in which the horror genre is the frequent site of experimentation in the extension
of our haptic and affective cinematic experiences. They examine two distinct but related
approaches to the deployment of the app for use in the home cinema environment – ie, in
companion to DVD or BluRay viewing of two recent horror films: App (2013) & Sadako
(2012). Their novel methodological approach combines close attention to the configured
audience engagement protocols and structures as opposed to the close analysis of audience
actual behaviours which feature elsewhere in this Themed Section.
Significantly Svensson and Hassoun also articulate the extent to which these second
screen experiences are used to focus and intensify ‘attention’ in very particular ways. This
tight control of attention is critical to the model of spectatorship that is privileged, assumed
and designed in to the augmentation. For the authors, the horror genre is an interesting
test case to illuminate this paradoxical shift in control featuring as it does a key
characteristic of loss of control or the threat of chaos as part of the formulaic aesthetic. The
apps under examination both play with this aesthetic in different ways but they both
feature an interaction protocol that crucially seeks to determine the nature and timing of
the interaction in very specific ways. This is not interaction as freedom from control – on
the contrary it is interaction as scripted and proscriptive tightly defined behaviours. They
also draw attention to how the gamelike offering promoted in the marketing for these
experiences is potentially undermined in this tightly controlled experience. This article
further signals the ongoing role of genre fiction as a site of technical innovation – it is in the
design of new thrills and frights to horrify that new tools and techniques are initiated which
ultimately transform the dominant medium.
In Virginia Crisp and Richard McCulloch’s article we turn from a focus on genre
fiction conventions to the ritualized conventions of a particular form of film screening that
has origins in the long established participatory oeuvre as initiated by the Rocky Horror
Picture Show (Austin, 1981). Their article – ‘“Watch like a grown up… enjoy like a child”:
Exhibition, Authenticity, and Film Audiences at the Prince Charles Cinema’ – focusses on this
London venue which is now famous for its regular screenings of cult films, and its
programme of participatory and ‘themed’ screenings which encompass Q&As, all night
marathons, and sing/quote-a-longs.
Crisp and McCulloch used a questionnaire to survey 200 respondents, from the
cinema’s own mailing list, in order to interrogate audience perception of the distinctions
between what Prince Charles’ cinema experience offers in contrast to other cinema visits.
Through the detailed analysis of these responses, Crisp and McCulloch revealed that
expressions of nostalgia were ever present – audiences were returning to much-loved texts
for deeper but crucially familiar and routinized engagements. Here the authors argue that

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this is an audience looking for just that little bit extra to add to their cinematic pleasures
and, not the audience of highly immersive fully interactive experiences such as those under
analysis elsewhere in this Themed Section. This Prince Charles audience is very much a fan
community who engage regularly with the format of experience that they have on offer.
With many independent and multiplex cinemas seeking to augment and add-value to
traditional film screenings, a lot can be learned from Crisp and McCulloch’s study of the
Prince Charles’ model. In terms of advancing the field of experiential cinema research, Crisp
and McCulloch raise the need for the advancement of agreed and robust typologies – a
demand we hope to have started to address in the section above and to advance further
through the wider research project.
The subject of cult screenings, formulas for participation, and the theme of audience
desire for nostalgia resonates within Linda Levitt’s article – ‘Hollywood, Nostalgia, and
Outdoor Movies’. The context for Levitt’s work is Los Angeles, USA where she interrogates
audience participation as it relates to outdoor cinema experiences such as Cinespia, Street
Food Cinema, and Electric Dusk Drive-In. Focussing specifically on the Cinespia brand – an
organisation known for its screenings of cult and classic films in open-air settings, often at
historic locations - Levitt examines the social media activity around certain events, drawing
particularly on audience interactions via twitter. Audience responses gathered by the
immediacy of the social media platform provided a richly affective digital research resource
which revealed the extent that the physical surroundings featured in the participants’ live
commentary.
Levitt demonstrates how it is these experience design elements that are more
frequently recalled by the moviegoers – including embodied aspects such as the food and
the atmosphere along with details of their fellow participants and other viewers. In this
context Levitt also identifies nostalgia as a significant element in these accounts of their
experience. Here however it is a nostalgia not just for the cult filmic texts but also
interestingly for the outdoor viewing conditions themselves.28 Levitt’s novel analysis of the
social media channels reveals the extent to which the participants use direct quotation from
the filmic texts as the means through which to articulate their own affective engagement
and pleasures.
The work of Rosana Vivar – ‘A film bacchanal: playfulness and audience sovereignty
in San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival’ – takes up nostalgia, diverse fan pleasures
and cult behaviours, but in an entirely different context. The participants in Vivar’s research
were part of a sustained engagement with a week-long film festival. Here she provides a
fulsome account of the annual “Horror week” that is San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film
Festival located in Spain and which has been held there for over 25 years.
Using a blend of research methods in a longitudinal study across the annual festivals
in 2012, 2013 & 2014, Vivar conducted ethnographic engagement and observation; online
questionnaires; focus groups and archive research. Through her analysis, she offers an
examination of the playfulness of participants who engage in ‘intentionally annoying,’
‘shout-a-long’ and ‘highly restricted protocol’, viewing practices and ritual performance.

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Vivar builds on notions of ‘in-the-know’ subcultural discourses and resistant

practices, and provides a nuanced account of the audiences critical and controlling
behaviours. As she notes: “the Horror Week is better defined through its audience’s
protocols of reinterpretation of films than for the group of films it shows”. This is in vivid
contrast to the other experiences under analysis in this section where our authors
repeatedly highlight the extent to which the protocols for audience behaviours are designed
for them in advance. Here we have audience defined and determined behaviours - however
aberrant. Vivar does not overly celebrate this audience ‘freedom’ to determine their
protocols for engagement as she highlights how these strict modes of engagement come
with hierarchies and privilege certain audience members above others.
Vivar contextualises this set of behaviours within the sub-cultural discourses
endemic of the particular audience demographic, providing an account for how these acts of
subversion are redolent of a nostalgia for a more politicized position within culturally
oppositional communities. Here Vivar highlights how, what we might describe as
‘rebellious’ practices, are positioned against normative modes of cinematic spectatorship
through the regulatory behaviours of the more experienced participants.
This juxtaposition of rebellion and control is played out in the analysis of the
concluding article – ‘From Conflict to Revolution: The secret aesthetic, narrative
spatialisation and audience experience in immersive cinema design’. Here Sarah Atkinson
and Helen W. Kennedy illuminate the ways in which it is the set design and the spatialisation
of the narrative that is the dominant technique for audience control. Like Pett, Atkinson
and Kennedy also examine the latest in the Secret Cinema Presents … series which took
place in London over 5 months in the summer of 2015. Their work embraces the multiple
sites through which the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back experience unfold. They
therefore include a consideration of the role of sites of consumption - such as nightclubs,
and pop-up stores; and the range of instructional communications delivered online. They
examine how these all contribute to the efforts to shape the participant engagement in
advance of the 5 hour long main event at a ‘secret’ location.
In their study it is the aesthetic of secrecy that engages a cult and fan sensibility of
particular passions and underground pleasures. Here they examine how this secrecy mode
is also used to shape and determine the engagement and participation of the Secret Cinema
audience. This article further demonstrates the extent to which play and gamelike tropes
are both offered and frustrated in the moments of interaction, like Svensson and Hassoun
these authors show how completely popular culture is saturated with the codes,
conventions and aesthetics of the video game.
In their focus on the spatialisation of the narrative they expose how the rule-bound
nature and controlling architecture of the experience design operate to try to fix or
determine the precise nature of the audience behaviour. Drawing on the differentiated
perspectives of a group of participants they offer a particularly rich analysis of the role of
technical production – lighting, set design, props etc. – in the determination of individual
and collective experiences. The multi-layered research method they deploy – combining

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elements of ethnography, participant observation, thick description and spatial analysis –

lays bare the complexity of these live experiences and the challenge they pose to any secure
singular interpretation.

Conclusion:
The territory of live cinema is in a process of rapid change, innovation and development.
Whilst this Themed Section captures an international perspective on some emergent
themes there is still much more work to be done. There is a need to continue the work of
tracing the genealogies and the topoi of this field to examine the forebears in – expanded
cinema, happenings, ballyhoo, the cinema of attractions and liveness more generally. The
typology outlined here (enhanced, augmented and participatory) will also need to be tested
and should evolve along with the field. We would also propose a number of key lines of
enquiry that are required in the advancement of the study of Live Cinema phenomena:
Industry, spaces and embodiment.
Whilst the Live Cinema Report (May 2016) captures the UK context for an
understanding of the scale of the UK live cinema economy much more should be done to
extend this to a study of the cultural form more globally - this would enhance the
internationally focused submissions in this Themed Section by revealing more about their
wider cultural contexts of production.
In the article in this section (Atkinson & Kennedy 2016) we make reference to
Kucklich’s work on playbour and we feel it would be very helpful to explore the extent to
which the live cinema participant is already imagined as willingly acceding their labour to
the full realization of the live event. It would be helpful to also examine the extent to which
an unpaid but highly skilled graduate labour force is instrumental in establishing and
sustaining the early stages of this new economy (extending the work into culture and
creative labour by Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011 and Conor, Gill, and Taylor, 2015).
In terms of the spaces of the viewing/participatory experience much more work is
needed to connect this up with the blossoming field of Film Festival Studies (De Valck, 2007;
Fischer, 2012; Iordanova, 2014 and Wong, 2011). There is a need to establish connections
with and position these contemporary experiences as continuous with previous cultural
practices such as travelling exhibition and itinerant cinemas.
In terms of embodiment, there is a need to consider the impact of technological
change, emergent technologies and novel experience design in a fast evolving industrial
context. For instance, the recent high-profile acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook and
Disney’s multi-million investment into a Virtual Reality (VR) company demonstrates the
commercial value attributed to VR and will no doubt lead to widespread experimentation
deploying these devices. The first major exhibition of VR works in this year’s Sundance film
festival, and the first UK VR Festival this month, demonstrates the cultural reach of VR. In
this context, investigations of how identity and phenomenological experiences might be
reconsidered within cinematic VR experiences is crucial. A final aim of this section will be to

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have laid the groundwork for and to have galvanized further research in this nascent field of
study.
We were delighted with the wealth of new work of such international reach that was
submitted in response to our call for contributions. This gave us a sense of a nascent,
dynamic and potentially flourishing field of which this curated collection represents only a
part. We anticipate that this Themed Section will be key in the inauguration of a fast
moving, but influential new area of empirical and intellectual enquiry.

Acknowledgements:
With special thanks to Lisa Brook from Live Cinema UK, for her ongoing collaboration in the
development of the Live Cinema Report. Heartfelt thanks and a debt of gratitude for the
thoughtful labour of our many generous reviewers: Jane Arthurs, Dan Ashton, Paula Blair,
Lavinia Brydon, Virginia Crisp, Jon Dovey, Elizabeth Evans, Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, Seth
Giddings, Stuart Hanson, Francesca Hardy, Matt Hawthorn, Paula Hearsum, Mark Jancovich,
Olu Jenzen, Bethan Jones, Matthew Jones, Irmgard Karl, Ewan Kirkland, Tanya Krzywinska,
Linda Levitt , Xavier Mendik, Matilda Mroz, Emma Pett, Greg Singh and Sophy Smith.

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Brunswick, Rutgers University Press.

Notes:
1
These include Secret Cinema, Sneaky Experience, Luna Cinema, Floating Cinema, Rooftop Film Club,
Drive-in Film Club, Picnic Cinema, Hot Tub Cinema, and Nomad Cinema – all based in London, UK.
2
The Event Cinema Association (ECA), http://eventcinemaassociation.org.
3 th
4 June – 27th September, 2015, London, UK.
4
This performance marked the 150th anniversary of the novel running from April 9th to August 30th
2015, in the Vaults at Waterloo Train Station, London, UK.
5
21st November 2014 – 11th April 2015.
6
12th June - 27th September, 2015, The Jetty, London, UK.
7
This was a show for 6-12 year olds and ran from 28th March -31st August, 2015, OXO Tower,
London, UK.
8
a concept developed in the late 1990s which has now become a fully fledged branded experience.
http://www.singalonga.net/
9
http://www.thelunacinema.com.
10
17th September, 2015.
11
27th- 29th August, 2015 – A Room with a View (1985), Badlands (1973) and The Princess Bride
(1987) were screened.
12 th
7 November, 2015 – at the Grade II listed church/arts centre Left Bank Leeds, Leeds, UK. Led by
Live Cinema UK and 29th Leeds International Film Festival, with a 1945-themed pre-film experience
which included dancing, music and food prior to a screening of Brief Encounter (1945).
13
11th October 2015, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, UK.
14
October-November, 2015 at various venues.
15
30th September, 2015. Asian Dub Foundation, Sheffield City Hall, UK.
16 st
1 October 2015 as part of the SensoriaPro 2015 programme. Chaired by Helen W. Kennedy, the
panellists were Lisa Brook (Live Cinema), Julia Benfield (Sneaky Experience), Sarah Atkinson (King’s
College, London) & Jo Wingate (Sensoria).
17
30th September, 2015, the Science Museum's IMAX Theatre, London, UK in a collaboration with
Edible Cinema.

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18
21 August - September 27, 2015, Weston-super-Mare, UK.
19
26 August – 4 October, 2015. An immersive art experience at Tate Britain, London, UK, which
promised to “stimulate your sense of taste, touch, smell and hearing.”
20
15th – 17th May, 2015, Sneaky Experience, Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, UK.
21
30th March, 2015.
22 th
5 July, 2015.
23 nd
2 November, 2015.
24 th
5 May, 2007, re-scored by The Bays at the Brighton Dome Concert Hall, UK as part of the
Brighton Festival.
25 th
6 October 2004 at Hackney Empire, London, UK.
26
27th October, 2015 at the Brighton Dome Concert Hall, UK.
27
See Brook, Atkinson & Kennedy, 2016.
28
This nostalgia in the recreation of the viewing practices of the past is also evident in the marketing
materials for a UK-based event –‘Transport yourself back to the bygone era of the 1950s and enjoy a
flick on the silver screen from the comfort of your own car. Cozy up with your favourite gal or guy
and have a smooch while you watch’. – the Drive-in Film Club, at the Alexandra Palace, London, UK.

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