Charlotte Orzel

Charlotte Orzel’s teaching and research focus on media aesthetics, histories, and globalization; media industry studies; film exhibition and technologies; and cultural studies. She is presently developing a book project, tentatively titled Cinema Circuits: Domestic Theater Chains and Global Exhibition Practice, which examines the recent history of the film exhibition industry in the US and Canada through the activities of the four “exhibition giants” that have come to dominate the market. The project analyzes the entanglement of domestic and international film industries (including cinema markets in Latin America, Europe, and Asia), and how shifts in industrial practice and structure across these scales reflect changing visions of cinemagoing and its audiences. She has also written about film historiography, IMAX, windowing strategies in film distribution, and industry trade conventions.

Selected Publications and Awards

• “Fraught Gathering: Studio-Exhibitor Reckonings at CinemaCon 2021,” in Media Industries in Crisis: What COVID Unmasked, ed. Vicki A. Mayer, Noa Lavie, and Miranda Banks (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
• Co-editor with Rafael de Luna and Ross Melnick, “Film Exhibition in Crisis” special section, Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2023).
• “‘See the Big Picture’: Cineplex Entertainment and Branded Cinemagoing,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 32, no. 1 (2023): 31–60.
• “Global Tools, Local Partners: IMAX in the Contemporary Chinese Exhibition Market,” awarded 2023 Graduate Student Writing Award by the Media Industry Studies scholarly interest group (Society for Cinema and Media Studies).
• Co-editor with Mary Michael, Media Fields: Critical Explorations of Media and Space no. 17: “Modularity/Modification.”