At the crossroads of history, film studies and anthropology, the research project "Faire communauté(s) face à l'écran: vers une histoire décentrée et croisée du spectacle cinématographique" (Community building at the cinema: towards a decentered and entangled history of cinema-going), started in 2021, aims to question the identities of global cinema audiences and intermediaries gravitating around 20th-century cinema from a transnational and comparative perspective. After several workshops (on cinema circulations around the Mediterranean, on travelling cinema beyond the early days, and on the social history of film distribution) and a three-year online seminar series (2021-2023), the project will close with an international conference on 28-30 November 2023, at the musée du quai Branly in Paris.

The conference aims to examine cinema’s shifting collectives within and beyond the confines of national borders. In this constant back-and-forth between cinema-going and community, it's not only the film itself, but also the screening experience that reshapes and reinvents the cultural, ethnic, national and religious identities of the viewers, as well as the trajectories of the communities frequenting the screening spaces. We pay particular attention to the bewildering diversity of social interactions that take place both inside and outside screening spaces, with a particular focus on non-hegemonic media industries.