Arbus made a number of photographs of movie theatres and their audiences in the mid 1950s, a subject she largely gave up when she changed from her 35mm camera to a larger-format camera and developed her distinctive style. Because of this, the picture does not seem typical of Arbus’s work, focusing not on the faces of the audience, but instead on their hunched bodies underneath the dusty stream of the projector’s light. Arbus was a keen filmgoer and was particularly interested in the difference between film and photography, contemplating once in an interview: "it always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction".