Cinema programming, the composition of films to make a specific "show," remains a neglected way to research the relation between audiences and film form. As a mode of exhibition " advertised, promoted, and circulating in the public sphere even before an audience is gathered " the program can be seen as an active social relation between cinema managers and their audiences. Changes in the composition of film programs, in my case the years before the First World War in Mannheim, Germany, are thus not taken as part of a teleological evolution of film form, but instead reveal emerging practices of cinema-going, a changing relation among showmen, distributors, audiences, and the city they are all part of. The category of "the audience" becomes a compliment to narrative, economic and technical influences. Selecting the city of Mannheim further allows me to draw upon the pioneering German sociological study of cinema audiences, conducted there by Emilie Altenloh in 1911 and 1912. Thus, I am able to compare her survey data to the film programs that were actually advertised and offered to the public at the time, and also include knowledge of the social history of the city, to approximate a description of the historical audiences she studied. Here I follow the findings of Miriam Hansen and Heide Schlüpmann, who both stress the importance of the female audience in Imperial Germany. I account for a reciprocal relation between female spectators and the film industry- local programming practice to describe the transitional period from the short film programme of the "cinema of attractions" to the dominance of the long feature film, i.e. from 1906-1918. Looking closely at the advertised programmes of Mannheim I show that almost all of the first multiple-reel feature films deal with women- topics, i.e. with the fate and fortune of women, concluding that the presence of women in the audience helped established the long feature as central to the institutionalized cinema program. The film program and the specific feature films represented female identity on the screen, responding to the perceived wishes and needs of the women who gathered as audiences. Taking this "program analysis" approach, because it provides a synopsis of the social relation between audience, industry, and film form, is a valuable tool for comparing the social place of film comparatively, across many films, and potentially across regions, countries, and cultures.

Based on her field studies between 1999 and 2003 in the South Indian State Kerala, the author critically reflects about Habermas's concept of the (bourgeois) public sphere, and also about later critiques of Habermas (eg. Eley). Schulze adds the new dimensions of human emotionality and humane ethics to the discussion of today's public (spheres) and civil societies which are part of globalising modernisations. It is poor and marginalized women's strongly felt compassion and love practised in their daily lives, which Schulze focusses on: these Marginalized ethics of the 'Good life' do sharply contrast the dominant societies' value systems; these latters consequently don't provide to the Marginaliezed a 'model'. However, Kerala, which is widely refered to as a development model - particularly with respect to the situation/ education of its women - is thus analysed by the author as a historically and culturally specific kind of 'modernity', which follows are rather violent and aggressive path of development in consonance with the general ruling anti-human/ nature philosophy of 'globalization'. Schulze's tool in her field work is 'participatory action research' and also her 'empathic camera' (camcoder). She mixed with local women who had organized themselves in women's groups with the urge to truly represent themSelves and their own ethics and goals in life - without the usual intervention of men/ of nationalist politics ruling Kerala's public sphere(s). In the course of Schulze and the local women groups becoming acquainted with each other, the scholar and the Marginalized felt the desire to support each other in their respective struggles for empowerment and for being respected as a human being. The author finally understood the fallacy and cynicism which lies in applying as a scholar the term 'women in Kerala' as if there wasn't the day to day particular violence which women of dalit ('untouchable'), or of adivasi (indigenous) background experience. Women's lives are moulded by networks of violence which are inherent to Kerala's castes, classes, and ethnicities, parallel to the basic oppression which women face because they are women. A group of dalit women in Kerala became particularly close companions in Schulze's quest for unravelling seemingly contradictory facts: Kerala's official claim to provide to women and other persons who were generally discriminated against in the larger Indian context, a supportive social and educational environment, on the one hand, and on the other hand the comparatively high number of suicides among Keralite women (and men), and the absence of women in what appears as Kerala's public sphere and 'civil society'. In several analytical steps which always centre around the experiences and feelings of the many poor and marginalized women, their life-worlds, their daily life philosophies, their views, voices, their ethics, dreams, Schulze unfolds these Marginalized visions, and tries to interpret them on their own terms. In this manner not only the mainstream society's propaganda about the 'Kerala development model' is demystified, but also to the reader insights become possible into a totally different set of ethics held by these women. They transgress notions of competition, of the 'necessary' monetarisation of all spheres of human life and of nature, of caste, religious, or gender conflicts. By means of 13 small video films the women together with Schulze showed and reflected upon their philosophy of an empowered 'Good life'.