With changing technologies and social habits, the communal cinema
experience would seem to be a legacy from another era. However, the
2010s saw a surge in interest for screening films in other temporary
public settings. This desire to turn ruins, pubs, galleries, parks,
village halls, and even boats into ephemeral cinema spaces is a search
for ways of being and working together, using cinema as a framework for
social encounter. This book documents contemporary practices of pop-up
and sitespecific cinema exhibition in the UK (with a focus on Scotland),
tracing their links with historical forms of non-theatrical exhibition
such as public hall cinema and fairground bioscopes. Through archival
research, observation and interviews with film exhibitors and
programmers, the book explores how exhibitors create ephemeral social
spaces, how they negotiate the various uses and configurations of films
and venues, and how they reinvent cinemagoing from its margins.