How did films – this collection of moving pictures destined for amateur photographers – turn, in the 20th century, into a universal spectacle produced on an international scale and distributed to people of every social strata? How did it survive competition from other forms of entertainment and how did it become, on social networks and the Internet, both a model and an inexhaustible source of images? This book takes stock of the cinema's influence as a social phenomenon, explores the challenges posed by a sociological analysis of films, discusses the complementary relationship between film producers and viewers and shows how motion picture productions as a whole have created a screen world at once spatial, temporal and tangible, laying the groundwork for a screen-driven society led by televisions, computers, tablets and mobile phones.
(revision of the work published in 1977 by Aubier-Montaigne)

Pierre Sorlin, born in 1933, is Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne and a Fellow of the Institute of Contemporary History in Bologna. He has directed documentary and historical films on the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Popular Front. Noteworthy among his published books on the cinema still available in bookstores is the reference work Esthétique de l'audiovisuel (Armand Colin, 2005), as well as L'avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (Aléas, 2010).