That the audience is essential for film seems to have been understood for over a century. One of the earliest and best known accounts of attending a picture show, published by Maxim Gorky in 1896, spoke of visiting “the kingdom of shadows” and described the effect upon him of seeing those silent, gray ghosts. Something more provocative than street scenes and baby's breakfast would be needed, he predicted, if this was going to find “its place in Russia's markets thirsting for the piquant and the extravagant.” Using oral history and other sources, Luke McKernan's account of the development of London's cinemas before 1914 turns on the discovery of viewers starting to “seek out films for their own sake” around 1905-06. One hundred and fifteen years later, a report commissioned by the UK government on A Future for British Film was subtitled “It begins with the audience,” although some critics suggested that this was more paying lip service than taking seriously the interests of consumers.

The problem has always been how to define such an ambiguous concept as “the audience.” Is it conceivably the specific audience for one screening – those present at the Nizhny Novgorod fair with Gorky one July day in 1896 – or, more commonly, the aggregated audience over time for a cinema or a film, as in the “the Theater Tuschinski audience,” or “the audience for The King's SPEECH…”? Arguably, two concepts of audience have dominated the history of cinema: one is an imagined audience of “they” and “we,” often credited with preferences and responses which are mere hypotheses, or projections of the author's assumptions and prejudices; and the other is an economic or statistical audience, recorded in terms of admissions or box-office receipts, which has become the dominant concept of “audience” for the film industry.

A third concept, however, emerged with the growth of the new human and social sciences, whose birth ran parallel to cinema's development as a modern medium, with the individual spectator understood in terms of psychology, anthropology or sociology. Pioneering examples of this new approach would be Otto Rank's psychoanalytic study, The Double (1914), which took a then-recent film THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1913) as one of its case studies, and Hugo Münsterberg's The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916).