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Podcasts have been described as “a cinema for the ears” and this application of a visual rhetoric to describe an audio-only experience results in an attempt to define what is still a relatively new medium. I argue that it is possible to consider something cinematic without the presence of moving images. Assertions in favour of the cinematic nature of podcasts often employ the visual imagination of listeners evoked by heightened audio characteristics that a particular podcast may possess. By focusing on film-centred podcasts specifically, which, in terms of content and form, are implicitly and often explicitly concerned with properties of the cinematic, I argue for a more conceptual analysis of the idea of a visual form of audio. While many film-oriented podcasts provide a supplementary celebration of cinema culture rather than manifesting a unique cinematic experience of their own, there are examples of film-centred podcasts that attempt to actualise what I will call an “audio-cinematic” experience, deploying the creative potential of the podcast to manifest an experiential aura that evokes a cinematic imagination. I analyse the sonic dimensions of audio-cinematic podcasts including my work with Neil Fox on The Cinematologists Podcast.

Prison films are beset by a fundamental paradox. Because mainstream film is reliant on a combination of the pleasure of the visual and the dramatic structuring of narrative, institutionalised incarceration based on the loss of liberty, extended temporal control and physical spatial restriction would seem to be fundamentally at odds with ‘the cinematic’. Prison as depicted on-screen is therefore a space in which visibly enacted retribution is foregrounded in a mode much more akin to what Foucault calls the pre-modern ‘theatres of torture’. The routinised banality of day-to-day life behind bars is eschewed in favour of the spectacle of the masculine body punishing or being violently punished. British cinema is replete with films set in prison, however, as the first part of this article explores, and academic analyses of such films are formulated around three discursive strands: debates around the constitution of the prison film as a genre, discussions of the potential relationship between cinematic representations and the ‘real-world’ sociology of punishment, and assertions about how national identity is reflected. The second part of this article deploys a comparative analysis of Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008) and Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), examining what is often taken for granted in previous work, namely how the environment of incarceration is produced as an aesthetic, social and even ontological space that contextualises and materialises a link between masculinity, violence and spectacle. I argue that the microcosm of the prison, on the one hand, reasserts the male body as the root of physical ‘being-ness’, yet on the other, reveals masculinity as a constructed performance determined by the social context of incarceration and amplified through cinematic aesthetics.

Dr Dario Llinares interviews Dr Sarah Atkinson about the core themes addressed in her recent monograph Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences (Bloomsbury, 2014). The conversation explores the context for new conceptualisations of cinema, which encompass and reflect the myriad ways film can be experienced beyond the auditorium in a digitally networked society. They also explore the historical antecedents for embodied cinema, discuss examples of expanded, extended and mobile film spectatorship, and postulate as to the effect of these transformations for film production, criticism and scholarship. KEYWORDS Expanded Cinema; Film Criticism; Film Theory; Digital Technology; Mobile Cinema; Spectatorship