Abstracts
Abstract
This article sheds light on the experience which we share in the one and a half hours which we spend in the cinema. It discusses the experiences that are framed between the opening and the closing of the curtain that covers the screen. Thereby it reflects on the reasons for the success and importance of the cinema in modern and especially late modern society, on its meaning for us as individuals and for the webbing of our social bonds. By discussing texts of Simmel, Turner, Sennett and Benjamin, and relating them with each other, we have tried to analyse critically the changes that might have happened to actors and audiences when the stage became a screen, and the actor part of an imaged story. As a result we have identified the cinematic experience as a new kind of ritual that fits with the needs and conditions of late modern society, a ritual wherein emotions play the central role.
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Appendices
Biographical notes
Natàlia Cantó-Milà
She is an Associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in Barcelona where she teaches courses in social sciences, and qualitative methods. She wrote her PhD thesis at the University of Bielefeld (Germany) on Simmel’s relational sociology. Afterwards she taught sociological theory, social politics, and methodologies in Leipzig, before sh received a call for UOC in Barcelona. With her research group (GRECS) she holds a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, which analyses the meaning of the future in late modernity. Her main research interests are emotions as objects of sociological analysis, sociology of experience (Erlebenssoziologie), sociology of the future and future studies, the body from the perspective of social sciences, and social theory.
Swen Seebach
He holds a PhD in Digital Humanities (Studies of the Information and Knowledge Society). He is Lecturer in Journalism and Sociology at the University Abat Oliba CEU. He is lecturer of communciation studies at the Open University of Catalonia. He is collaborator within a variety of national and international projects and works with research groups at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Open University of Catalonia. His fields of research interest are emotions, love, social theory, consumption, film studies, digital journalism and storytelling and the analysis of moralities and value systems in different social contexts.
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