This book shows the impact of cinema on individuals across the globe, from the 1890s to the present day. It analyses and celebrates the audience's point of view, shaped by time, experience and place, providing a rich, entertaining portrait of a medium that became so transformative because anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, could share in it.

Luke McKernan is a film historian with a particular interest in film audiences and the sociological study of cinema. He has been collecting examples of eyewitness testimony of cinemagoing for many years through the website https://picturegoing.com. His book Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 (Exeter, 2013) won the 2014 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award.