Cinema Intermediaries, Communities and Audiences (Soviet Siberia, Post-Ottoman Greek Thessaloniki, Colonial Maghreb)

This chapter looks at intermediaries who have introduced or acted as agents of cinema in a given community, linguistic pool or multicultural territory. It is part of a larger research project, “Community Building at the Cinema: Towards a Decentred and Entangled History of Cinema-Going”, whose aim is to examine audiences as shifting collectives beyond and within the confines of state borders. Three case studies, taken from our respective fieldworks in Soviet Siberia, multicultural post-Ottoman Thessaloniki and colonial Maghreb, are examined side by side. Their comparison makes it possible to observe social processes through the historical sources, revealing the fluctuations of diverse and intermingled social bodies in relation to distribution, exhibition and cinema-going.