This book has investigated the role that talking about cinema culture, memories of film viewing and the feelings that cinema stirs in oneself can play in making oneself more knowable to a listener. Throughout the previous chapters we have explored how cinema is used to discuss feelings about particular times and places in one’s life as well as how the film theatre itself could shape the daily experiences of audience members. Stories about engaging with cinema have been used to support perceptions or senses of memories from the very early years of survey respondents’ and interviewees’ lives, suggesting that talking about cinema can be part of the creation of ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2002) as well as a means to attempt to conjure and vicariously experience historical moments lived by elder family members. Turning cinema engagement into political engagement, or into a form of labour, by organising film-related events or even producing films themselves builds another layer around the kind of self that can be formed by a relationship to cinema culture and stories about that relationship. The preceding chapters have each made a case for talking about cinema, in a variety of aspects, as a mode of representing something about the self to another, and at the same time bringing that self into being through its very description.

As Judith Butler writes, giving an account of oneself is no small matter in the project of a human life. Butler argues that an un-narratable life can be considered unliveable, in that it is not recognised by interlocutors: ‘After all, no one survives without being addressed; no one survives to tell his or her story without first being inaugurated into language by being called upon, offered some stories, brought into the discursive world of the story’ (Butler 2005: 63).